The World's Gonna End on Somebody's Birthday
by Mission to Marzipan
Summary: Percy's world ends on his 21st birthday, but not in any way that he's trained for. As grief threatens to tear him apart, what follows could end up with him leaving the mortal world and everyone in it altogether. Angsty waters dead ahead.
1. Chapter 1

**New fic! You can expect semi-regular updates at first because I have quite a bit of it written in draft form, so that's good I guess. I know where it's going and I'm fairly sure I know how to get there, which isn't always the case for my fics so, again, good stuff. This is going to be sad and angsty, I think, so watch out for that. Uh, what else? I think that about sums it up. Enjoy if possible. If not possible then I'm sorry. I will try to do better next time. I don't own the lyrics below ****—**** they belong to Johnny Clueless. I am just borrowing them for inspiration and a title.**

_**The world's gonna end on somebody's birthday.**_

_**The sky's got to fall on somebody's cake**_**.**

**With that depressing little interlude, Mission to Marzipan out.**

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* * *

**Even before the knock at the door, Annabeth was out of breath. As soon as she heard it she gasped, wrenching her watch the right way up. The rubber strap slid slickly on her sweaty wrist.

_Shit_.

Where had the time gone? She cleared her throat and shoved her bangs off her forehead with her forearm, giving the small apartment one last, cursory glance and trying to calm down. Given that it was a college apartment that was regularly all but remodelled by monsters casually dropping by without any notice, firmly ruling out any chance that their security deposit would be returned, there was only so much she could do. Well, she had done her best. Granted, the majority of the work had included shoving accumulations of dirty laundry into the laundry basket (she may even have sat on the cursed wicker object and jiggled up and down in desperation to get it to close as if it were an over-packed suitcase, not that you'd catch her divulging that to anyone _ever_) and ramming piles of junk under the couch, but all in all she considered it a job well done. Hey, she was enrolled fulltime in college, lived with a slob, had only had a couple of hours to clean and was pretty far in terms of personality and neat-freakery from the inhabitants of the Demeter cabin back at Camp. All things considered, it was a job _very _well done.

For crying out loud, she had used three different attachments on the vacuum cleaner for the love of Olympus — even that round bristly one. She had wasted a whole lot of time digging out the instructions for the vacuum cleaner in order to discover its use because it was taunting her with its total lack of purpose; as a child of Athena, she was damned if something as trivial as a domestic appliance was going to beat her. What showed more dedication than that?

On her way to open the door, she hastily kicked an escapee tennis ball (_why_ did they have a tennis ball when neither of them played, for Zeus's sake?) back under the couch, blessing the valance running around the bottom that she had hated at first. The sofa had been second-hand and cheap — mostly, she guessed, because of the ugly paisley material tacked around the bottom to hide the legs. Yet today it had come in very useful for concealing everything that she had shoved underneath the couch, banished to the land of dust bunnies so big they would have made Medusa stop and think twice.

"Coming!" she called, stopping in front of the mirror next to the door and shoving her hands through her hair, eventually deciding to twist it up with a clip she had found in her pocket so that the nape of her neck could breathe. New York City in August, where the heat gathered in a pocket that sunk ever-lower, bouncing off concrete and plate glass to make the traffic fumes cloying as it attempted to dry-roast you alive.

On the carpet just to the left of the mirror was a green blotch that had been left when Nico, sporting a broken arm, had come tumbling out of the shadows followed shortly by one of the aforementioned monster guests, forcing Percy to leap out of bed and perform a decapitation in his boxers. In the meantime, Annabeth had been desperately holding a too-thin silk kimono closed over a negligee an Aphrodite cabin alumnus assured her would 'blow Percy's mind'. When the monster was dead she had sat on the couch with Nico trying not to blush as she savagely fed him ambrosia, not yet having decided whether she wanted to choke him to death with it or not, given the scene he had pretty much just landed on top on. The point was that monster blood _stained_ and she had meant to try and get it out of the carpet but had forgotten all about it.

"Just a minute!" she yelled to the door, her heart racing in panic as her eyes darted around the room, eventually coming to rest on a large, fake fern abandoned by the last resident that she had faithfully watered for about a month after moving in. For the first few weeks, she had happily marvelled at her apparent inability to kill it, which had so not been the case for any other form of plant life she had come across in the last twenty-one years, until the excess water had begun to seep out into the carpet beneath. She dragged it over to the stain and plonked it on top of it, gave the leaves a quick blow to try and dislodge some of the dust, sneezed twice, then opened the door.

Sally Jackson was standing on the other side carrying the biggest Tupperware container Annabeth had ever seen with both hands. Dangling off her arm was a large shopping bag made of burlap.

As she blew hair out of her face she greeted Annabeth with a slight strained smile and sidled past her with some difficulty due to her burdens. "Hey, sweetie. How are you?" she asked, moving to the kitchen. With a relieved exhalation she gratefully dumped the bag on the tiny folding card table they liked to pretend they ate off (the reality was trays balanced on their laps on the couch or, in Percy's case, often over the sink to save having to wash a dish) and placed the Tupperware cake box on the one square foot of counter space that wasn't occupied by a microwave, a coffeemaker or a toaster.

"I'm fine, Mrs Jackson," Annabeth said, catching a bulbous glimpse of herself in the curved stainless steel of the toaster and wincing, hoping she didn't look as red as the appliance made out. "How is everything? Do you want a drink?"

"I'm better now I've put that bag down," Sally said. "And just some water, please. For now, anyway. Paul's gone to the liquor store to buy something a little fizzier," she said with a conspiratorial wink as Annabeth took a bottle of water from the fridge. Sally shook her head when Annabeth made to reach for a glass. "It's fine; I don't mind it from the bottle," she assured her, twisting the top off and taking a long gulp. Wow, she did _not_ miss the days when she had lived in a building without an elevator. "So tell me, how was my son the birthday boy this morning? Insufferable?"

Annabeth smiled and gestured to the couch and they both walked over to it and sat down. "No more trying than usual," she assured Sally when they were both settled. "Quite quiet to be honest. I think he's kinda freaked out at turning twenty-one, actually," she confided. "I thought he might be; he spent the month leading up to my twenty-first telling me how old I was getting, so…"

"Ah. Classic displacement anxiety," Sally supplied promptly, nodding wisely. "And in a way, classic Percy. He'll be fine. It's probably just hard for him to accept that the law says he's an adult now, even if he refuses to act like one." She took a sip of her water. "Adult prisons and all," she added darkly after swallowing, knowing that despite the Mist Percy's monster-slaying antics may just one day land him in the sort of trouble that required the kind of bail you couldn't just slap on an AmEx and forget about. Something to look forward to for the future… She glanced around the apartment, almost as if she was seeing it for the first time. "Oh, Annabeth, you didn't have to go to so much trouble for me," she said, giving the younger woman a sympathetic look as she put her water down on a coaster on the end table.

"Trouble?" Annabeth asked lightly with a tight smile, attempting an innocent face whilst thinking about the pair of jeans she had practically worn through at the knees kneeling down to scrub out the tub.

Sally fixed her with a look, cocking an amused eyebrow. "Annabeth, please. I was cleaning up after Percy while you were still in diapers. I know the only way you can live with him and still have an apartment this tidy is by sending him away for a few hours and cleaning until you're ready to drop. Been there, done that."

"Uh," Annabeth began, blinking and entirely lost for words. Instead of speaking, she broke into a fit of relieved giggles. "There were plates _fossilizing_ under the nightstand," she eventually managed. "I had to douse them in Clorox before I even wanted to look at them. And oh my gods, I think I had forgotten that the bedroom carpet was blue under the sea of clothes…" She finally managed to swallow her laughter. "I mean, I'm not exactly a neat freak," she added hastily, lest Sally think she was badmouthing her son. "If it comes down to a choice between reading a book and doing the dishes it's pretty obvious which one I'd choose. And some of the mess was Nico's, who seems increasingly to be living here… but yeah. Sorry. I think I'm still high on cleaning product fumes. It's just that I didn't want you to think we lived like _total_ slobs but given that we kind of do…"

Sally smiled at her. "I knew it. It's no good telling Percy to clean up, either. It just won't go in. How _is_ Nico, by the way?"

_Oh, you know, occasionally dropping in on me and your son while we're mostly naked chased by something big and ugly with a beak and enormous claws…_ "Irritating," Annabeth opted to answer sunnily instead with a shrug. "But it's Nico. If he ever stops being annoying, we have to worry. He seems okay."

"Good. I haven't seen him in a while; he stopped dropping by when Percy moved out. I guess you inherited him… Speaking of Percy, where did you send him to get rid of him so you could clean?" she asked almost eagerly, leaning forward towards Annabeth. She knew from experience that you couldn't clean around Percy Jackson, because if you turned your back he'd have created another disaster zone before you could turn to face him again. "If you ever need to get rid of him, just give me a call and we'll think of something. I found that sending him to the South Street Seaport Museum always worked, for obvious reasons, but he's probably over that now, huh? I think I wore it out."

"I sent him grocery shopping," Annabeth said simply with a half-shrug.

Sally winced. "Oh, no. Bad move. You'll be rid of him for a few hours, sure, but you won't get anything on your list and he'll wander back in with something extremely bizarre. One time it was a donkey he insisted followed him home from a petting zoo which, again, obvious explanation for that one now but at the time..."

Annabeth nodded vigorously. "Oh, believe me, I know. I once sent him out for a bag of frozen peas because Nico had appeared requiring first aid _again_ and he came back three hours later with a six-pack of Bud _Light_ of all the beers that he somehow hadn't got carded for and a pack of Mythomagic playing cards with my mom on the front. Oh, and with his shirt in tatters because a monster had decided to jump him in an alley. So this time I sent him with a list of stuff we didn't really need. And as an added bonus, I managed to pack Nico off with him."

"Is Nico any better at Percy at grocery shopping?" Sally asked.

Annabeth twisted her mouth in consideration. "Yes and no," she said eventually. "He has more respect for food than Percy does; maybe it's the Italian thing? Also, he's always trying to keep me sweet so I don't evict him from the couch and make him go back to his dorm, so he usually manages to reign Percy in enough to get at least two thirds of the list done. To be honest, all three of us are probably too ADHD to actually have a completely successful shopping trip. Too many shiny packages. Plus, given that between us we can probably just about manage to boil water... I just wanted both of them out of my hair. I guess it was kind of mean to send Percy to the store on his birthday, though."

"Yes, it was," Nico's voice chided from the bedroom. The drapes were still drawn in there, so it was sufficiently dark for him to have shadow-travelled in with Percy in tow. "You're a very bad girlfriend, you know." Percy squeezed past him, a party hat on his head and another in his hand. Nico ducked under Percy's attempt to jam a hat on his own head and scrambled for the relative safety of the kitchen, glaring at Percy.

"I don't recall party hats being on my list," Annabeth said dryly, rolling her eyes but failing to hide a smile at the sheer amount of goofy Percy's hat was radiating. Maybe he was having more fun on his birthday than she had thought, which was good. She had been worried that he was, as Sally had suggested, entering a massive freak out about growing up. Must be kind of scary, finally becoming an adult but not really having anywhere to go with that, having already saved the world by the time he was sixteen and all. How did you top that in your adult life?

"Yeah, well, nor were booze and handguns, but we had to test Percy's ID out somehow," Nico said brightly. "Hey Mrs Jackson," he added. "I thought you'd like to know that Percy's been out corrupting a minor."

Percy scoffed and leant over the back of the couch to kiss Annabeth's forehead, entrapping her chin in the elastic of the party hat he had unsuccessfully tackled Nico with on the way up. "Please," he said to Nico, adjusting the hat on Annabeth's hair. "Like _you _need any corrupting." He paused, giving Annabeth's hat another tweak. "I can't believe you didn't buy me any party hats," he added to her accusingly, pushing up from the couch and walking to the fridge, Nico eyeing his every step warily. "Sad, _sad_ world we live in. Makes me wonder why I bothered saving it."

Annabeth rolled her eyes and reached down into a bag next to the couch, pulling out not just a box of hats but also a box of noisemakers. She whipped them both at him as hard and fast as she could, but of course his reflexes were equal to hers and he caught them easily, a wide grin spreading over his face as he tore them open.

"Happy birthday, honey," Sally said, getting up and dragging her son into a long hug. He held her for longer than their standard mother/son hug she noticed with a pang of concern, but when she drew back, Percy had successfully managed to place one of Annabeth's hats on her head, mostly without her realising. "How does twenty-one feel?" she asked, adjusted the elastic so the knot wasn't digging into her ear and studying him contemplatively, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. He seemed _over _jolly; not that Percy was miserable by nature but he seemed to be acting as if he was less worried about something than he actually was, disguising it by being extra outgoing.

"Kind of old," Percy said thoughtfully. "I think I feel a hip complaint coming on."

"At least you don't have a front lawn to keep chasing all of those pesky kids off of," Nico pointed out helpfully, peeling back a corner of the lid of Sally's container to take a look at the birthday cake inside. He whistled. "Your cakes get bigger and better every year," Nico told her, sealing the lid back down. "You're too good for Percy."

Sally smiled, wrenching her gaze from her son over to Nico. "Better just comes with lots of experience. Bigger is because more and more of them get eaten every year," she said, raising a wry, pointed eyebrow at Nico. "Percy and I have come a long way from birthday cake for two."

"Where's Paul?" Percy asked suddenly, looking around the room expectantly. He already had hat in his hand for his stepfather.

"He had to make a little stop," Sally said vaguely, her eyes twinkling. "He'll meet us in the park."

"Surprises huh?" Percy said. "Not sure how I feel about surprises."

"Will it help if I tell you it's a mortal surprise and therefore one that's not likely to kill you?" Sally asked with a smile. "I figured you'd had enough surprises of the deadly variety in your life so far." Sally thought she saw a flash of panic at the mention of deadly surprises but it was gone as quickly as it came and her son was soon eying Nico tactically.

"We all have," Annabeth agreed, cocking her head slightly as Percy began to creep across the room to the kitchen, where Nico was buried in the fridge.

When the son of Hades emerged with a soda, Percy crossed the room in a flash, wielding the party hat, and made to jam it on Nico's head. A skeleton warrior sprang up between Percy and Nico and the hat ended up perched bizarrely on top of the warrior's skull in an amusing yet disturbing juxtaposition of greying bone and garish colour. Nico opened his soda and the skeleton sank through the kitchen floor and vanished, taking the hat back to Hades with it, leaving Percy looking at Nico's triumphant smirk in frustration.

"Fail," Nico snorted with an infuriating grin. "Look, I don't care if it's the birthday of Zeus himself; the day I wear one of those things is the day my dad throws on a scarf and some earmuffs to go ice-skating on the Styx."

Percy narrowed his eyes determinedly. "Well then. Let's hope he remembers where he put his skates."

"Come on, Nico," Annabeth said tiredly, trying to hide a smile. "If I've got to look stupid, then so do you."

"Uh, hey, he's not _my _boyfriend," Nico shot back. "Besides, I've always thought you looked kind of stupid all the time."

Annabeth blinked slow and hard at the insult and then set her jaw, poking her tongue into her cheek in irritation. She got up and rounded the couch, laughing in that threatening you're-going-down way she did so well. 'Stupid' was not the kind of word you tossed at a child of Athena and lived to tell the tale. "Oh, now it's on, death boy. Percy, hold him down."

Percy grinned and leapt on Nico, knocking the soda out of his hand and sending it skittering across the scuffed linoleum, spilling its contents as it went. Given that Percy was four years older than Nico and children of Hades weren't exactly known for their physical prowess, Percy was soon clasping his arms around Nico's waist, pinning the teenager's arms to his sides. Nico spat out a string of Greek curses, kicking up from the floor, but Annabeth vanished with the aid of her Yankees cap, the sudden disappearance startling Nico for just enough time for a party hat to appear out of thin air and stick itself on his head. Annabeth reappeared, doubled over with laughter at Nico's seething rage.

"Okay, fine." Nico glowered, admitting defeat as Percy let go of him. "Fine, you win. Two against one, but whatever. If you think you won fair and square then I'll wear the stupid hat, but I will also remember this and when you die, there'll be _a lot _of waiting around for you two. Your paperwork is going to keep getting lost and you will have to reapply _frequently _for your deaths to be valid. You think waiting in line at the DMV is bad? You've seen nothing yet."

Percy only rolled his eyes and grinned, jamming a noisemaker in Nico's mouth in an attempt to shut him up.


	2. Chapter 2

**APOLOGIES FOR THE DOUBLE POST. POST-PUBLISHING FORMAT ISSUES ARE THE BANE OF MY LIFE.**

**I should be in bed now. The people at my new job aren't used to dealing with me when I get into my erratic sleep patterns… Whoops.**

**Anyway, thank you kindly for all of the reviews and favourites from the first chapter. Review replies are headed your way tomorrow evening for those of you I haven't got back to already, but for now I just wanted to get this up. Slightly ominous beginning which should interrupt what was a fairly saccharine beginning to what I billed as an angsty story. I promise the angst will come. How can you have real angst if you can't juxtapose it with the good times first? TThis is how awesome your life could be! (But won't ever be this way again). My theory on angst, anyway.  
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**So, you know the drill. Enjoy or don't. That, dear readers, is up to you. And strap yourselves in for a (moderately) long chapter also, I guess.  
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**Marzipan over and out.**

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* * *

**Rachel was fairly sure that she was used to the whole shebang that came with her Oracle gig by now. Both green mist and speaking in rhymes and in triplicate were now practically child's play: after five years, they'd had become second nature to her. The only thing she still had trouble with was when the visions came to her suddenly, when she was in the middle of something else, which was pretty much always. Sometimes she got visions in dreams, which was quite a convenient time to have them, really, because she was lying down and all, but usually Apollo (she guessed it probably _was_ him) just blindsided her with them. As if he were sticking her in the chest with one of his arrows, the prophecy or vision would come as a short, sharp shock, and today was no exception.

She was dressed in all of her paint-spattered finery: a simple outfit of a tank top and a pair of jeans that her mother had gone pale and clutched at her pearls when she had seen the state of them, which probably meant they'd been expensive for such a plain outfit. But really, when her mother insisted on buying her '_nice_' or '_appropriate_' clothes _still_, at age twenty-one, to save the agony of seeing her daughter dressed in something rescued from a bargain bin, what did she expect?

There was a dustsheet spread on the carpet of the day room in an old folks' home in the New York suburbs. Around her, volunteers were repainting three of the walls in an institutional off-white. The fourth wall, however — _her_ wall — was to have a mural on it of her own design. She was just trying to judge the dimensions of it so she could at least get started before going home to change and heading for Percy's picnic when the suddenly Oracle burst into being, knocking her own consciousness temporarily aside.

Even the other mortal volunteers could see something of an aura around Rachel as she picked up a brand-new paintbrush and began slashing paint on the wall, abusing the brush so that is splayed outwards in seconds. Though the Oracle's accompanying green mist wasn't visible to them, there was still something perceptively shimmering around her, and one by one they stopped rolling beige paint onto the walls and crept closer to her, standing in a semi-circle behind her and watching her artwork unfold in silent and slightly nervous awe. She was painting at an inhuman speed, messily swapping colours and blotching paint on her face and hair. It was on her lips, probably in her mouth, but when one of her fellow-volunteers touched her gently on the shoulder to see if she was okay she shrugged him off violently.

"Rachel?" tentatively tried one short girl with violet hair cropped into a pixie cut. "Are you okay?"

As much as Rachel tried to play it down they had all seen her, Rachel Elizabeth Dare, on Page Six in ball gowns and diamonds looking like she was frantically hoping the floor would swallow her as she stood stiffly next to one society bachelor or the other of her mother's choosing. They knew that she was, to put it bluntly, loaded and therefore likely to be a little eccentric — and she was — but this was off the scale.

"Rachel?" another volunteer attempted, gently grasping the wrist Rachel was painting with.

The Oracle turned to him, Rachel's eyes blazing with a green light that was leaping from the sockets. _"Foolish mortal," _three Rachels hissed at him. "_I am the servant of Lord Apollo and I do his bidding. Obstruct him at your own peril. Unhand me!"_

He leapt back from her as if he'd be burned or shocked; judging by the way he was rubbing his hand on his thigh and checking the palm it might have been both. Though none of them would admit it later, they all made the silent yet unanimous decision to very quickly disappear on a collective break, all of them looking massively freaked out.

When they came back to see if Rachel was okay she had vanished, but the wall she had been standing in front of was covered in a crude rendering of a scene that could be clearly recognised as Central Park to anyone who had ever visited it. Swooping down from the sky was a half-dragon, half-woman monster with leathery wings and many legs wreathed in what looked like writhing snakes. Standing over the fallen form of a bloodied blonde woman were three figures: two guys with dark hair and a girl with blonde hair. One of the male figures had a black sword; the other had a golden sword and a blue trident whereas the girl sported two golden knives. They were surrounded by what looked like women with snakes for legs. All five of the volunteers stood there gaping openly at the scene in front of them until they were interrupted by the manager of the care home, who had come in to see their progress.

"Good God!" he choked, taking off his gold-rimmed glasses and polishing them hastily on his tie, hoping desperately that what he was seeing was actually a grease smear on the lenses. When he put them back on, the state of the wall was made all the more shockingly clearer. "I was told one of you was an _artist_!" he stuttered eventually, not able to keep a slight wail of dismay out of his voice. "I was shown an excellent portfolio! No, no: this will not do at all. Why, it's not even _painted _well and even if it were, well, how _morbid_. Why would anyone want to use this room if they'd be faced with something that grim every day? Where is she? Your redheaded so-called 'artist'?"

None of the other volunteers knew what had happened to Rachel. Even as they watched the red paint on the body Rachel had painted oozing down the wall, they were all making silent pacts with themselves to forget all that they had seen and heard in regards to this room and Rachel Elizabeth Dare.

* * *

When Percy had mopped the soda up in the kitchen following Sally's insistence ("You'll get ants, and poor Annabeth has been cleaning all morning", to which Percy's response was, "She has?") the four of them left for Central Park, still wearing their hats, where they intended to have a birthday picnic. There was nothing more that Percy wanted, he had said, than for them all to be together having fun on his birthday, because that's what birthdays were supposed to be about for him. No one had argued with this plan. Well, no one except the weather. The morning had started off as a mirror image of all of the long, hot days that had stretched out before it, but now there were ominous-looking clouds threatening in the east, smearing the blue sky with a particularly volatile shade of grey-purple. The humidity had spiked in a way to make sitting in the park more than a little uncomfortable, but the sun was still out, albeit through a haze, and none of them were about to complain. This was pretty much all Percy wanted for his birthday after all and who was going to deny a guy who'd saved the world his birthday wish?

The birthday boy in question looked up from ramming a cupcake stolen from his mother's bag into his mouth and nearly choked when he saw Tyson wading out of the lake they were picnicking next to, perfectly dry and (it seemed) bigger than ever. He was carrying a huge hiking rucksack on his back. Percy hoped the Mist was particularly thick today as his half-brother greeted him with a one-armed, rib-cracking hug that lifted him off his feet. Which the other arm Tyson snatched Annabeth to his chest also, leaving four legs dangling helplessly in midair and two demigods on the verge of asphyxiation.

"PERCY! ANNABETH!" Tyson bellowed, his voice loud enough to make several ducks take flight from by lake, quacking in absolute terror. Even the mortals seemed to have heard and were glancing over curiously at the huge guy with the gigantic rucksack hitched too-high on his back who was in the process of hugging the very life out of two people.

Percy tried to give some greeting in return, but there was nothing left in his diaphragm to do so. He turned his head and saw Annabeth purpling with lack of oxygen. Luckily, his mom came to their rescue.

"Tyson! You came!" she said loudly, beaming at him.

Tyson was so pleased to see Sally he placed Annabeth and Percy back on their feet, where they stood gulping in air gratefully, and whirled around to face Sally, his arms outstretched to dole out another hazardous-to-ribcages hug. Sally intercepted him quickly by thrusting a sandwich that looked like it was made from half a loaf of bread and filled with a good inch of peanut butter and jelly at him. She was too old to be getting a hug like that and so had come prepared. Tyson took the sandwich gleefully, burbling something incomprehensible through a mouth glued together with peanut butter that she took to be a thank you.

"Daddy gave me day off!" Tyson said excitedly once he had swallowed. He set about trying to coax and suck every ounce of peanut butter off his tombstone-like teeth between sentences. "Said today was special day for Percy! Said to say, 'Happy Birthday'."

"It's good to see you, big guy," Percy said fondly, finally managing to draw enough breath to straighten up. "How's life under the sea?" he asked, failing to keep the tune from _The Little Mermaid _out of his head even after all these years.

Tyson puffed his chest out proudly, enjoying being reminded, even after five years, of his position as his father's lieutenant and the wisdom and insight it brought him. "Good!" he said enthusiastically. "Bigger, better. Tyson helps with strategies sometimes now." He suddenly remembered that he was holding half a sandwich and took another huge bite, practically decimating it. While he was chewing his one eye focussed on the hats they were all wearing, and as he swallowed his bottom lip stuck out in a pout. "Is there no hat for me?" he asked sadly.

"There are hats for everyone!" Percy said decisively, grabbing one out of the bag.

"Don't remind me!" Nico called from the shade of a very nearby tree. He was leaning against the tree's trunk which his legs stuck out in front of him crossed at the ankles, his party hat still on true to his earlier promise but pushed to one side.

Percy chose to ignore him and beckoned to Tyson, who immediately dropped to his knees happily, denting the grass, so Percy could put the hat on his head. The elastic wouldn't fit under the Cyclops's chin no matter how much tugging Percy did, but luckily Sally remembered she had a needle and a spool of thread in her purse, just in case, and with a couple of lengths of thread through the elastic holes, Tyson's hat was soon tied on as securely as everyone else's.

"I got you gift," Tyson said shyly, gently patting his hat with an enormous hand to make sure it was still on. He swung his backpack onto the ground with a very loud clunking noise that made it sound like no one present bar Tyson would have been able to lift half its contents and undid the zipper. From the depths he pulled a beautiful oyster shell crafted out of silver, tied up with glittery seaweed and with a glowing sea anemone on the top in place of a bow. It was a thing of such high craftsmanship that even Nico emerged from the shadows to admire it.

"Tyson, wow… Thanks!" Percy managed eventually. "It's… _awesome_."

"Open!" Tyson urged excitedly, bouncing on the balls of his feet and grinning like a maniac (which was actually all kinds of scary, given that he was a Cyclops), his face shining with anticipation.

"There's more?" Percy asked in surprise, thinking that the oyster shell had been it. It was so delicate, so well made, and so… _pretty, _feminine connotations of the word temporarily shoved aside, that Percy would have been happy enough with it if that had been his entire gift.

"Is just a box," Tyson said dismissively, reaching forward to open it himself to show Percy what was inside before remembering himself and drawing his hands back, holding them behind his back to stop them from opening Percy's gift for him.

Percy reached for the seaweed-ribbon and it fell away under his touch. Inside was a thick leather belt with a hefty-looking buckle, joined at the back by a fairly small disc of celestial bronze which was intricately carved with painstakingly small renderings of various triumphs from the Battle of Manhattan. As he moved it, the sunlight glinted off the surface and the scenes changed, almost as if they were holographic.

"Tyson, this is amazing," Percy breathed, pulling it out and taking in the disc from every angle. It genuinely looked as if the figures carved there were alive.

Tyson looked around the park nervously before bending down so he could talk quietly in Percy's ear. "Daddy told me about your weak spot," he said quietly to Percy, pulling back and nodding at his half-brother, his eye wide. "But do not worry, because they will kill me before I tell anyone," he promised fiercely, smacking himself on the chest with his fist. "I will not tell."

"It's armour," Annabeth said suddenly, taking the belt from Percy and studying it. "It's like a girdle—" she broke off to glare Nico into silence as he let out a snort of laughter at the idea of Percy in a girdle, "—with an armoured disc to protect your weak spot," she finished, running her hands over the back of the disc to find that it was perfectly contoured to fit into the small of Percy's back. Not that she was intimate with the small of Percy's back, of course…

"Tyson, I don't know what to say, man," Percy said, slightly awestruck. He gave the Cyclops a hug then took his new piece of armour from Annabeth and buckled it on under his shirt. It was invisible once he pulled the shirt back down, as well as being so light he barely knew it was there. "I love it."

Tyson beamed and gave a small round of applause, relief bringing a wide smile to his face. "Good! Was hoping you would. Seemed like just what you needed, brother. The world is very dangerous, even for you. Daddy gave me a gift for you as well. Should help with danger." He reached into his backpack again and pulled out a long box made out of the same stone as the Cabin Three, so long it didn't look like it should fit even in Tyson's huge backpack. Tyson handed Percy the box, who immediately staggered under its weight. Annabeth lurched forward automatically and grabbed some of the box as well, and between them they managed to lower it to the ground without breaking their spines in two. Percy crouched down to slide the lid off the box, then sat down hard on the grass when he saw what was inside.

A long blue trident, a smaller version of the one his father used, was lying at the bottom of the box. Percy reached out tentatively, almost as if he was worried it was a mirage and would vanish. Armour and a trident. Was this the best birthday ever or what? With mesmerisation in his eyes he grabbed it, feeling a tug of power similar to that he felt when he picked up Riptide but _stronger_. He felt totally at home using Riptide, sure, but this was different: this had been made for _him_. He was about to take it out of the box when Annabeth elbowed him in the kidney and shook her head. Perhaps a park full of mortals was not the best place to get out a trident, even with the Mist.

"You are _so _not keeping that in the apartment," Annabeth muttered, imagining the damage Percy would do with it. Their apartment had suffered enough.

"Tyson…" Percy managed to get out over his awe. "Tell him _thank you_." His half-brother had already lumbered off to play with the ducks that had returned warily to the pond, though, so Percy sent his thanks with a silent prayer to his father.

A far-off smile spread over Sally's face as she peeped into the box and sighed happily. "He had a trident when I first met him," she said fondly. "The mortals saw it as a fishing pole but I knew what it was. He was staring at the ocean and holding this trident…" She sighed again. "Twenty-one years…"

"What's twenty-one years?" Paul asked, coming up behind her holding a massive hamper. He set it down on the grass and slipped his arm around Sally's waist, brushing her cheek with a kiss.

"Oh, since Percy," Sally said quickly clearing her throat, her face flushing. "It feels like yesterday."

"It practically was," Paul said jovially. "He's only twenty-one. Wish it felt like yesterday that _I _was twenty-one," he added, absently rubbing at the ache in his coccyx, a combination of age and lugging a picnic hamper halfway across a park. "Hello… everyone."

"Twenty-one is ancient in demigod terms," Nico informed Paul flatly and morbidly, crouching down to inspect the trident curiously instead of looking at him. "Percy's a real old-timer."

"Says the guy whose birth certificate would put him around eighty," Percy said dryly, nudging at Nico with his foot and nearly knocking him over.

"Hi, Nico, our little ray of sunshine in residence," Paul said brightly. "I didn't see you there." He walked over to Percy and gave his stepson a hug. "Happy birthday, Percy." He glanced down into the box and his eyes flew wide. "Is that a trident?" he half-yelped in disbelief. The assembled crowd were spared from answering as Percy placed a hat on Paul's head and Sally popped the top off a bottle of sparkling cider.

"Champagne," she said, pouring the cider into several glasses, "will have to wait until later. Wouldn't want to make any park rangers angry today."

"Mom, for the last time, he wasn't a park ranger, he was a monster," Percy said, reluctantly sliding the lid closed on his trident. "Just because they're wearing a uniform doesn't mean they don't want to kill me."

"Well, he seemed perfectly nice to me," Sally said lightly with a shrug. "Up until he tried to gut you, of course. I don't know; the older I get, the thicker the Mist seems."

"Peeeeeeeercy!" someone bleated from over by Nico's former bolthole tree. They all turned to look as Grover and Juniper appeared from the bark, Juniper leading Grover by the hand.

"Grover?" Percy yelped, dashing over. "I didn't think you were even in the _country_. How did you remember?"

Grover snorted. He had given up wearing jeans, fake shoes and a hat to hide the fact that he was a satyr; he could now manipulate the Mist to surround himself with the projection of a normal human form should any mortals be looking his way. "Like I would forget your birthday," he scoffed. "Am I not your best friend?"

"Remembering has absolutely nothing to do with it being practically on top of the date of our last stand against the Titans when half our friends died," Juniper added helpfully. "Not at all."

Percy grinned, stepping forward for a hug from Grover. "It's good to see you, man," he said happily to Grover.

"Give it to him then," Juniper said impatiently when the hug had finished, nudging Grover in the side and flicking her head at Percy.

"Oh, right," Grover said, absently rubbing the spot where the nymph's particularly pointy elbow had caught him. He reached into his bag and pulled out a shiny wooden box with a celestial bronze plaque on the top that read _Happy 21__st__ Birthday, Percy — Lots of love, Grover and Juniper. _"It's not much," Grover said hastily. "It's just, well, I've not got the best paying job in the world and Juniper's currently employed as a tree, but we thought you'd like it."

Percy opened the box to find it full of small square compartments. In each compartment was a seed labelled with the type of tree it had come from.

"It's a seed from the strongest specimen of every type of tree at Camp," Juniper said excitedly. "Maybe one day you can plant your own forest to play capture the flag in or whatever it is you campers do that puts you under the nymphs' feet. Then you can invite the half-bloods to play in _your _forest so I can get some peace and quiet at last."

"We thought it might remind you of Camp," Grover said loudly to cover Juniper's words and giving an embarrassed half-shrug. "And us."

"It will," Percy assured him vehemently, closing the box gently and placing it down on the grass. "Definitely, it will. Thanks, guys." He hugged them both then stepped back with a grin, shoving his hands into his back pockets.

"You like it?" Grover asked, brightening and sounding surprised and relieved all at once. "You really like it?"

It was Percy's turn to scoff. "Come on, of _course _I like it. It's from you, isn't it?"

"Are you going to invite Grover and Juniper over, Percy, or are they just supposed to stand there all day?" Sally asked genially, kneeling in front of her bag and rummaging around. "I bought Grover's favourite," she said, pulling out a clear bag full of flattened cans.

"Pepsi cans!" Grover bleated excitedly.

"Yup. _Not_ Coke cans," Sally said, smiling and holding them out for him.

"I don't care what anyone says," Grover said happily as he walked over and took the bag. He twisted a ring pull off and chewed on it like it was an hors d'oeuvre and he was savouring the flavour. "_I _can taste the difference."

"What _don't _you have in that bag?" Percy asked in disbelief, picking up his box of seeds and walking over. "Who are you, Mary Poppins? If so, well… maybe leave the singing part to her, yeah?"

Sally narrowed her eyes at him playfully. "Very funny, especially coming from someone who regularly used to slaughter the tunes of one particular teenage singer from Tennessee while in the shower," she said pointedly, smirking at his wide-eyed silent pleas for her silence and deciding to give in to them. It _was _his birthday after all. "No, I'm just well-prepared," she continued evenly as Grover selected a can from the bag as if it were a bag of chips and started chewing on the aluminium. "It never hurts to be prepared. Especially if you want a day to go off without a hitch."

"I guess if we're giving gifts I should give mine," Nico said, reaching down under his t-shirt to retrieve a crystal vial on a silver chain. He unclasped it and wound the chain into his fist so the vial was dangling for Percy to take. "It's Lethe water," he explained as Percy took it. "Not fun to get, by the way. A few drops should work on most people you'd rather not have remembering what you've done. I thought maybe for times the Mist wasn't strong enough this could get you out of trouble, because you seem to attract a lot of that. Also, now I think about it, maybe you could start dosing up Annabeth's morning coffee? I'm kind of bored of you two fighting all the time and she'd be much more docile without all of her memories."

Annabeth stepped forward. "Oh very funny. If you're planning on sleeping on my couch tonight you've got another thing coming, di Angelo," she said angrily. "Why don't you—"

Nico saw Annabeth ball her fist, about to smack him, no doubt, and so he quickly produced something else from his pocket. "About the whole couch situation — how's this for some rent?"

When Nico opened his fist, Annabeth gasped, her anger vanishing as she stepped forward to admire the blue brilliant cut stone in his palm. It was about just more than an inch across on the top and she bent down, practically poking her eye out on it.

"Sapphire?" she asked, plucking the stone from Nico's palm and holding it up to the light.

Nico scowled at her. "Sapphire?" he scoffed. "Please. It's a blue diamond."

Annabeth made a strangled noise and nearly dropped the stone. "A _blue diamond?_" she hissed, keeping her voice low and handing it back to Nico quickly as if it had burned her. "Where did you get a _blue diamond?_" she demanded. "Nico, that thing is bigger than the Hope Diamond and that's worth…" Her throat went dry and closed up at the thought of the hundreds of millions of dollars she had just been holding in her palm.

"I stole it from Persephone's garden," he explained with a shrug. "It's summer; she's not down there and it's not like she'd miss it if she was. Is it expensive? Would I have got away with giving you something cheaper? Don't you like it?"

Annabeth gave a longing sigh. "Nico, that… may just be the prettiest thing I have ever seen, and you _know _I don't do pretty, but what am I going to do with a diamond that expensive? It might look a little suspicious on eBay, you know? You should put it back where you found it."

Nico rolled his eyes. "Fine," he huffed, shoving it back into his pocket. "But don't say I didn't _try _to help with the rent. Remember that next time you start complaining."

Percy was eating again, this time an apple. "Why don't you just create some _actual _money?" he asked, taking a bite out of the apple. "I mean, I thought your dad was the god of wealth."

Nico wrinkled his nose. "Okay, first: thanks for the apple juice flecks on my face. Secondly, apparently some of my dad's kids tried that during the late twenties. Creating money from nothing, pumping it into the economy by buying stocks and shares and loaning people money to buy lots of new, mass-produced goods. According to him, it didn't go too well."

"Yeah, I can see why he wouldn't think something that ended in The Great Depression wasn't a happy ending," Annabeth muttered, rolling her eyes.

Nico shrugged. "All I know is, Zeus made him swear that his kids would never have the power to create currency at will ever again. The Olympians hadn't really been in America all that long at the time and they'd nearly been dislodged already. He was _not _happy." Thunder growled in the distance, either in agreement or just as part of the storm clouds building over the Atlantic.

"Is everyone here?" Sally called from her position on a blanket, opening up Paul's hamper and checking the sky anxiously. She had seen the weather forecast this morning and had prayed that they were wrong as usual but it looked like their predictions were coming true.

"I hope you guys are hungry," Paul said, rubbing his hands together and kneeling down next to his wife. "Something tells me we have too much food here."

"You have _met _Percy, right?" Nico asked as another speck of apple landed on his cheek.

"Rachel said she'd be along a little later," Percy told his mom, ignoring Nico. "Something about a volunteering job she's working on. She said to start without her and that she'll be here soon."

"Well then, let's eat!" Paul said, beckoning them over and grabbing a glass of cider. He waited until everyone had a glass in their hand before continuing. "Happy twenty-first, Percy. Thanks for being pretty much the best stepson a guy could ask for, as well as making sure my life stays _interesting_ in my middle-age. Cheers." There were echoes of the sentiment from everyone present and Paul took a drink. "By the way, you know you're buying your old man a beer later, right?" he asked, his eyes twinkling.

"Define 'buying'?" Percy asked.

Paul laughed. "Fine. I will supply the money. But you've got to sit there with me in a bar and drink it."

"I can't think of anything better," Percy said, genuinely meaning it and that fact reflected in his smile.


	3. Chapter 3

**Shorter chapter, this one. I've now used up all my stock of pre-written stuff, with which all I needed to do was edit and try not to hate just a tiny little bit before posting. Now it's me and my keyboard one on one, so the next update might be a while. Or tomorrow. I don't know yet. We'll see how it goes. **

**Thanks for all of the reviews and favourites on this. Every comment/favourite I get really makes my day in ways you can never imagine. I write because I _have _to, I love it, and comments are just the icing on the cake for me that make the whole thing really delicious. If that's not too strange a comparison. I don't write to get them but that doesn't stop you guys from putting a big smile on this author's face when they do happen.**

**THANK YOU,**

**Marzipan.**

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Rachel's heart was pounding wildly in her chest as her eyes desperately raked the street in front of her. She had come out of the vision-related trance with the customary light-headedness, which she was more than used to by now. Even the ringing ears weren't bothering her as she stumbled into the road, sure she looked like a drunk but unable to do anything else as her brain tried desperately to comprehend what she had painted. Luckily it was a very quiet street because she stopped in the middle of the road still reeling physically. The wall in front of her had been covered in a scene that, although it was a total abuse of her artistic talent, was unmistakably something very bad that was going to happen to those very close to her.

Rachel had been doing this long enough to realise that there were two parts of her: Rachel Elizabeth Dare, artist and unwilling socialite, and on the flipside there was the primal force of a virginal prophetess thousands of years old who spoke through her. A pretty big flipside, granted. They never met to nod awkwardly to each other in some kind of mental corridor inside her head as her consciousness was leaving and the Oracle entered to speak with her mouth. They were very separate aspects.

She knew that now, but she had had to learn it the hard way. The Oracle's prophecies often sent the campers on quests, quests that sometimes ended in their deaths. How was she supposed to deal with the horrible, painful, gut-wrenching guilt that rose in her chest like bile when a camper died following a prophecy she had issued? By the time she was eighteen and had only been the Host for two years she had started feeling like she had sent more people to their deaths than half the commanders of the army.

Visions of burned, stabbed, deformed, crushed and just… _broken _campers as they lay there about to be folded into their shrouds swam through her dreams. She said goodbye to every single one of them, no matter how much it hurt, because didn't they at least deserve that from the girl that had thrown them into the baying, bloody maw of the world outside camp, a deadly world filled with monsters and evil?

Eighteen had nearly broken her. The thought of reaching her eighteenth birthday when she had seen so many _children _burnt on funeral pyres at camp all because of her brought images of clawing around deep inside her and wrenching out the Oracle, evicting the spirit and ending the pain it caused her by any means necessary. It was Chiron who had counselled her in the art of being an Oracle and reminded her that the mortal part of her was separate from the prophecies. He helped to alleviate the burden she was carrying, a burden that got heavier every time the Oracle's words turned fatal. Heroes had been listening to and dying because of the Oracle's words millennia before Rachel had even been born. What happened was out of her control and not her fault, and so slowly she had learned to cope even with the tragedy of the death of campers. Even if she couldn't completely repress the guilt and grief, it no longer paralysed her, as Chiron had warned her it mustn't.

This was different, though. This had brought back all of those old feelings — the vision had struck so close to home that it was practically physically smarting. Prophecies were necessary and expected; heroes sometimes waited for years to receive one that applied to them. They knew the risks when they undertook them and yet they wanted desperately to be part of them anyway for the sheer glory involved.

But visions weren't prophecies. Visions forewarned her of current events and she could act to _change _them before the happened, before they came true. You can't change a prophecy, fate, but by the gods she could fix this. Percy, Nico and Annabeth were her _friends_ — sometimes she thought of them as her only true friends because they didn't care that she was the Oracle or had a trust fund containing the GDP of a small African nation — and they were in danger. Not only that, but she could definitely stop it if she acted quickly enough.

She reached automatically for her pocket and her cell phone before remembering. "Shit," she seethed through clenched teeth, giving a stamp of her foot.

The last time she had used her cell phone a swarm of Telekhines had appeared out of nowhere and descended on her and Annabeth. The BlackBerry had been smashed in the resulting battle and Annabeth had nearly died. Knowing that her hands were covered in Annabeth's blood because she had answered one stupid phone call was enough to convince her that she would never use a cell phone again. Now it was working against her though; Annabeth had also given up hers that day, carrying it around with the battery in a separate pocket to the phone for use only in the direst of emergencies. The only other person she knew in the park that definitely had a cell phone was Percy's mom, but she didn't have the number: in fact, as far as she knew, she had never been given it.

She looked up and down the street again, wrapping her paint-spackled arms around herself and smearing her own handprints in a muddy brown mess of paint on the opposite upper arm. Okay. Think. Her eyes stuck on the minivan that had brought her and the other volunteers from the city. The driver was walking up and down the sidewalk having a cigarette. Crouching low, she slipped over to it, peering in through the window to discover the keys still in the ignition. She looked around nervously again. _Why _wasn't this the city, where she could have hailed eight cabs by now?

Rachel couldn't drive. Apart from those few hours in Percy's stepdad's Prius on the beach, she had never been behind the wheel of a car in her life. That sounded ridiculous, sure, but she had good reasons. Firstly, though her parents had taken her to the most discreet and expensive doctors they could find when she had begun 'blacking out' (otherwise known as having visions), even flying her to a clinic in Geneva, nothing had ever been found wrong with her. The DMV disliked giving driving licenses to people with unidentified medical conditions that included fainting fits, so she had never been allowed a licence in the first place. Even if she had she probably wouldn't have used it — as much as she hated to admit it, the three Dares had a town car and driver each to ferry them around. Even if Rachel did feel like getting somewhere without leaving a massive carbon footprint well, she lived in New York City: there was always the subway or walking.

How hard could it be, though? Move the gear stick to D, hit the gas, the brake if it looked like you were about to crash into something or someone, and generally pray to Apollo and hope that he didn't want to see his Oracle dead inside an unrecognisable tangled wreck of what used to be a minivan. Easy, right?

She chewed on her bottom lip for a split second then eased open the door of the van and slipped inside, fumbling under the seat for the lever to move it forwards. This was an emergency after all. They keys turned easily enough but the sound of the engine rumbling to life made the driver's head whip round. He dropped his cigarette in surprise and dashed forward as Rachel put the van in reverse and shot backwards so she could clear the car in front when she drove off. When she turned back round and put the car in drive, the driver was standing in front of her waving his arms. She revved the engine and the van edged forwards but the driver didn't move, banging his hands angrily on the hood of the car and calling her some names that she was pretty sure would cause her father to discretely put a hit on him if he ever found out.

"You crazy bitch! What do you think you're doing?" the driver shouted at her, spit flying from his mouth. "Get out of there right now!"

She yelled in frustration and killed the engine, shouldering the door open angrily. It didn't look like he was going to move any time soon. "Hi. Look, I know you're upset but I _really _need to borrow this car. It's an emergency," she said in her best pleading voice, the one that got an extra zero on the end of a cheque from her father to a charity of her choice. "Please."

"Are you kidding me? They'd fire me!" the driver said, walking around the car and grabbing her by the arm, trying to drag her from the seat.

"Okay, fine!" Rachel said, throwing her hands up. "Fine. I won't take it but can you please just drive me back to the city? Something really bad is going to happen and I have to be there to stop it."

"Not my problem. What do I look like to you, hey? A freaking cab driver?" He yanked her extra-hard and she came tumbling out of the door, barely managing to get to her feet in time to save her knees from the asphalt.

She tried to wrench her arm out of his grip but couldn't, so instead she turned on him, her green eyes burning and her teeth bared into a snarl. It was almost as if her red hair had become electric and the driver actually shrunk away from her. "Get off me! If you—"

A police cruiser came round the corner at this point and stopped when he saw the struggle going on by the roadside. A young police officer got out, pulling his cap onto his blonde hair. He had a round face and baby-blue eyes that made him look like a kid playing dress up in his dad's uniform. His sidearm looked huge and ridiculous at his hip until she noticed that he had undone his holster before getting out of the car.

"Get off me!" Rachel yelled suddenly in a shrill voice, the surprise causing the driver to lose his grip as she pulled her arm away. "Help!" she added, for extra effect.

"Oh, that's a good one. That's rich. Don't you play that game. Officer, this girl is trying to steal my car!" the driver said, jabbing an accusing finger at Rachel even as she leaned back against the van, rubbing exaggeratedly at her upper arm and trying her best to look generally pitiful.

The officer paused, looking between them and not knowing who to believe. Rachel huffed a sigh. This was taking too long and she didn't have time to waste. "Please. I was _borrowing _it," she scoffed, dropping the act and going for the more direct approach. She scraped back a strand of hair that had fallen in her face and pushed herself off the side of the van. "And only because I really, really had to. I wouldn't have if this wasn't an emergency. Anyway, I would have replaced it if you're that attached to it."

"Oh yeah? What with, your _babysitting_ money?" the driver said with a snort, sneering down at her.

Rachel inhaled, drawing herself up to her full height and setting her jaw before answering. "I am Rachel Elizabeth Dare," she said tightly and steadily, glaring at him. "I will have you know that if I liquidated a _quarter _of the assets I have in my name I could buy this entire _street _if I wanted to. I don't think a minivan is beneath me when it comes to financial reimbursement." Her green eyes were practically giving off sparks of contempt.

"Ma'am, if you _were_ attempting to steal this man's vehicle I am going to have to ask you a few questions," the officer said.

Rachel rounded on him. It pained her to do this but she needed to get to New York and quickly. "Did you not hear me?" she shrieked, jabbing him in the chest with a finger and squaring up to him.

He reached for his handcuffs and unhooked them from his belt. "Ma'am, that's assault on a police officer."

"Don't you know who I am?" Rachel demanded, her eyes seething at him. "_Rachel. Elizabeth. Dare. _Do you not know me? Do you not know _who I am? _I swear if you don't get on your radio and find someone with the common sense to know _who I am _then I am going to have a freaking aneurysm. The next time my father has supper with the Mayor you are so _fired_. That's it! You'll be done!Kaput. Off the force. I will personally make sure you can't even get a night security job! You will _never work again_!" She was at a pitch just a notch below dog whistle now, edging herself into what she hoped looked like full blown hysteria and completing it with an angry tremble and flared her nostrils as she glared at him.

The officer was so shocked he almost dropped his handcuffs. There was a brief stare-off between them, the cop's throat bobbing nervously, his mouth open in surprise, and Rachel hamming it up with her chest full-on heaving in exaggerated anger, one hand clutching her pearls and the other pointed at him with a shaking finger. Although her father _did _occasionally have slightly clandestine meetings with the Mayor, she had no idea if the Mayor had the power to fire police officers at will. Luckily, it seemed like the officer in front of her didn't know, either.

He broke the stare first. "Let me, uh, just, uh, radio this in," he said sheepishly, swallowing nervously and turning away from Rachel's burning stare, which kept boring into his back as he walked a few paces away, muttering quietly into his radio for a few minutes. He walked back with his face flushed red. "I'm sorry, Ms. Dare. There had been a mistake."

"No kidding," Rachel sniffed.

"Wait a minute, she was trying to steal my car!" the driver said, getting in the cop's face. "Did you not see her trying to steal it?"

"Well, I didn't steal it, did I?" Rachel said tiredly, rolling her eyes. "So stop you moaning, please; it's given me a migraine." She turned to the police officer. "I have to get back to the city. Now, please. I trust you're going that way?"

"Uh, well—"

"Excellent, so it's settled" Rachel said, dropping the act and smiling calmly. She walked around the car and sat in the passenger seat. "Well, come on. I'm in a hurry."

The officer gawked at the back of the red head riding shotgun in his car, then turned sluggishly towards his cruiser as if he were in some kind of trance. Eventually he got in and buckled his seatbelt, catching a glance in his rear view mirror of the driver gaping with his arms spread wide in confusion. He flicked his eyes down to the floor, still not entirely sure what was happening. Who _was _this half-crazed girl who was running hotter and colder than any bathtub he'd ever been in? What did her father do that had got his Captain back at the station screaming blue murder at him for being as a big an idiot to try and arrest her?

Rachel buckled her seatbelt in satisfaction as the cop started the engine. "Is this the button for the sirens?" she asked matter-of-factly, jabbing it to test and settling back in her seat as the sirens blared to life. "Oh good. You're going to be driving very fast. I think you'll need them."

The tyres squealed as the car sped off down the street. Rachel was staring out of the window straight ahead, her hand clutching at the shoulder strap on her seatbelt so hard it had gone white.

_Please let me be in time. Please, by all of the gods of Olympus, please, _please_ let me get there in time…_

_

* * *

_"Are you _sure _you won't have anything to eat, Juniper?" Sally asked, looking around at the remains of the decimated picnic on the blankets spread around her for something that might tempt the nymph.

"I'm fine," Juniper said. "Honestly, I'm fine. We don't need to eat like other creatures. Just the sunshine is enough for us."

Sally looked up almost guiltily at the gathering clouds that had swallowed up most of the sunlight. "Well, it looks like I can't even provide you with that…" she said apologetically, fanning herself with a paper plate in an attempt to dispel the humidity that was settling down on the park like a shroud.

"Rain is good too," Juniper said with a shrug. "Sunshine and rain is all we need." She turned to her left and slapped Grover's stomach but he barely reacted. The satyr was lying flat on his back and making a strange mixture of burping, pained bleating noises and the odd snore. "I keep getting him to try it as a diet but no, it's burritos this and enchiladas that. Mexican food. I've never been to Mexico but I hear there's lots of desert. No water for _proper_ trees to grow in a desert, unless you count cacti, which of course no one does."

Sally smiled faintly and uncertainly and looked to see where Paul had got to. He was next to the lake with Tyson, trying to teach the cyclops how to skip stones. Tyson was watching intently and then, before Paul could stop him, he wrenched up a paving slab from the ground and tossed it into the middle of the lake. It actually skipped across the water a couple of times before sinking with a massive splash. Tyson applauded while Paul patted him on the back weakly.

Percy was lying in a similar position to Grover but with his head in Annabeth's lap, his eyes half-closed in a doze caused by severe food coma. Annabeth was occasionally running her fingers through his hair when she remembered, which wasn't often because she was absorbed by a book she had pulled from somewhere.

Nico was stood off by himself, which wasn't unusual, but Sally did a double take after her eyes passed over him the first time. He looked unusually serious, even more so than normal. His arms were folded but his fingers were drumming nervously on his upper arms and he kept cocking his head as if he was listening for something that no one else could hear. A small frown crossed Sally's features before Juniper started talking about juniper berries as fondly as one might talk about something that wasn't sometimes deadly poisonous. As she nodded her head to mimic listening, she tried to figure out what was wrong with Nico but he had vanished, even though she had taken her eyes off him for less than a second. His disappearance only ratcheted up the uneasy feeling brewing in her stomach.

Scraping her hair sideways and onto her shoulder so her neck could breathe she took another glance up at the clouds to try and gauge how long she could let everyone enjoy this moment before the heavens opened on them. A premature twilight had fallen over the park and most of the occupants were hastening away as the clouds shifted colour like an old bruise and began to take on a greenish-coppery hue. She sighed and started reaching for the empty plates and cups scattered around her so she could put them back in the basket. They didn't have very long before they got very wet. Juniper, to her credit, did help by rolling Grover off one of the blankets and whisking it into the air, giving it a good shake to dislodge the pieces of trash on it and turn them into blossom, which then floated away.

"I know I said we nymphs like rain, and we do," she said matter-of-factly as she folded the blanket up and handed it to Sally. "I mean, we _really _like the rain. Especially when we're thirsty. Lightning however…" she paused nervously, intertwining her fingers distractedly as she looked up at the clouds. "We're not so keen on lightning. It's not very tree-friendly," she finished with her voice pitched higher than usual and a nervous swallow at the size of the approaching storm. The nymph looked desperately down at Grover and nudged at him with her foot, but he just rolled onto his stomach and started chewing absently at the grass with the side of his mouth.

"Do you need to go?" Sally asked her as she popped lids back on Tupperware containers. "It's fine if you do, you know."

Juniper nudged Grover again with her foot but he didn't stir. She had started wringing her hands and shifting from foot to foot. "Can you tell him I've gone?" she asked Sally. "I just… lightning. There's going to be lightning and I really don't like lightning. It scares me. I really just want to be with my tree."

"Go," Sally said. "Thank you for coming. I'm sure—" She never finished her sentence because Juniper had sprinted for the nearest clump of bushes and dived headfirst into them, melting into the foliage. As if it had been holding back for Juniper's sake, a huge crack of thunder suddenly split the air.

Percy gasped loudly, sitting bolt upright and knocking Annabeth's book flying with his head. He was breathing hard, his green eyes wild and darting about until they focussed on Sally. "MOM!" he screamed desperately over the practically deafening rumbling that bowled down at them from the clouds, just as something much worse than the rain they were expected swept from out of the sky.


	4. Chapter 4

**Sorry that this took so long, and sorry to leave you with such a cliffhanger. Part of the reason is because my writing took off totally in the wrong direction and I actually had to scrap most of the chapter and start again (although I did decide to include some of it in a deleted scene down there because I quite liked it even if it wasn't right for the chapter) and then life got in the way in that pesky manner it has. So sorry.**

**This is quite a long chapter with an extended fight scene. So that may not be everyone's thing but this is the way the chapter is going. Sorry.**

**Please enjoy. Or, like me, do not. This chapter felt a little off while I was writing it and I'm not sure why... Probably because it required so much redoing.  
**

**Mission to Marzipan.**

**

* * *

**The Dream had been plaguing Percy for a couple of months before his birthday, so he felt like it deserved capital letters, what with the fact that it had become a huge part of his waking life as well as his sleeping one. It had started off with short little blips, fragments that he could barely remember dreaming but that clung vaguely to him. Flashes of blood, of tears, the sense of being surrounded without knowing by what or even where they were. He could get out of bed in the morning and rub them away with the sleep in his eyes and not even be bothered by them until he came to lay down at night, when the fleeting images were the last things that he saw before he slept.

It wasn't bothering him back then, not really. He couldn't even tell what it was he was seeing, and he had had a _lot _of dreams that were more vivid and more disturbing in his life as a demigod. Besides, the fragments of these dreams slipped away like water through cupped hands (of someone who wasn't him, anyway) whenever he tried to dwell on their meaning.

But over the following weeks, like a jigsaw that had been started at the edges, pieces gradually began to fall into place and a clearer and clearer picture was built up. It was small things at first, the addition of slightly crispy grass, sun-scorched and a little yellow, underneath the sense of blood and tears and fear and danger. Then, over subsequent nights, a lake appeared in the middle distance and the water felt so _real_ to him, and if anyone knew water, it was him. It didn't feel like a figment of his imagination.

Slowly, The Dream had started to leach into his everyday life and he had begun to obsess over it all day and try and push himself deeper into his subconscious to discover more at night. More than the shreds and loose threads that had been offered to him so far. Maybe if he could find out the meaning of the dreams, what was at the centre, then the dreams would go away. If he was being warned, once he knew what about, that usually fixed dreaming issues and he _had _to be being warned; monsters had begun appearing around him in The Dream. He regretted his delving strategy instantly, but there wasn't an exit button for this. The monsters were blurry, unidentifiable shapes but he knew they were out to kill him.

Death made its presence felt in the dreams around about the same time he realised that he could actually _feel_ the crispy grass beneath his knees as he knelt there, could see his dirt-covered hands reaching out for something on the ground, could feel beads of sweat tentatively testing out an avenue of escape and suddenly making a mad dash down his back. It was becoming more and more real every time he went to sleep.

The unidentified monsters had begun to turn into _dracaenae_ around himand a _massive _blurry shape had appeared instead once they had made themselves known to him. He had no idea what it was but who cared when there was _blood, _so _much_ blood_, _and he knew that there was no way what was on his hands could be his? He had started to not be able to breathe properly in his dreams. The first time this had happened he was acutely aware of a band of pressure squeezing his chest before an intense pang of grief and pain — _inner_ pain — woke him up, gulping in air like someone (again, that wasn't him) saved from drowning.

That first time, Annabeth had been so shocked that she'd knocked the bedside lamp to the floor in panic as she clicked it on. The lamp had thrown a skewed beam across the room and up under his chin, scooping out hollows in his cheeks and eye sockets and highlighting the sheen of sweat on his forehead. When she established that a monster wasn't trying to murder him as he slept, she gave him what she could with a hug and shushing noises. As she rubbed his back, she had no clue why she was making the shushing noises or where they'd even come from, just that they seemed appropriate right at that second.

Slowly his breathing returned to normal and she felt him relax in her arms. A last shuddering gulp of air returned his breathing to its usual rate and he kissed her on the forehead, muttering something about nightmares and telling her he was fine. After that, though, she could tell that he hadn't gone back to sleep, just led there rigidly staring at the wall until the sun made its appearance and he had an excuse to throw back the covers.

Demigods have nightmares, she told herself, sitting up in bed and watching Percy practically run out of the bedroom door. She had nightmares. They _all_ had nightmares. But Percy was so strong to be letting something like simple nightmares bother him. Hugging her knees, she heard the apartment door slam and knew that he'd gone towards the ocean, the way he always did when something was bothering him. She sighed. Why hadn't he come to her? What had happened in his dreams to make him so rattled?

Percy didn't fool her with his sudden caffeine addiction and the subsequent shorter amount of time he spent asleep, even when he muttered the fairly plausible explanation that Nico had gotten him hooked. She could almost believe that, seeing as how Nico seemed to be permanently wired on the stuff since he'd discovered the joys of coffee, but this was something else. He stayed up staring at the TV until the time the National Anthem would have rolled around in the old days, back before infomercials and softcore porn had taken its timeslot. Still, that didn't mean she didn't hear him from the bedroom waking up on the couch having accidentally nodded off, stifling a pained cry and choking back more sobs, thinking he hadn't woken her when he had.

The door slamming first thing in the morning had become more reliable than her alarm clock and Percy began to smell increasingly of saltwater, which meant that he wasn't just going to the beach; he was diving right under the waves in the hope that putting mile or so of freezing, crushing water above him would serve as a barrier for whatever he was dreaming of. Judging by the fact that the dreams where returning every night, she could tell just how well this tactic was working for him. Still he wouldn't let her know what was wrong.

Percy felt trapped in The Dream by this stage. There were no longer flashes; they were practically movie clips, always starting at the same place and running for just a little bit longer every night. He knew that someone was dying in them by that point. Whoever was lying in front of him was slowly ebbing away.

Nico had appeared in The Dream, bleeding and filthy. There was so much detail that Percy could _see _Nico's heart pounding in his scrawny chest thanks to his ripped shirt. The amount of someone else's blood that was on his hands increased every night. He couldn't get away from it, he _had _to look at whoever it was, but The Dream wasn't going to give up its secret that easily.

Annabeth had consulted with Rachel unbeknownst to Percy and even Rachel, with all of the power of the Oracle, had come up mostly blank. It was getting harder and harder for Percy to wake up from it and more and more vivid while he was asleep. He kept clawing back to the waking world expecting to see Annabeth with the same cuts on her face that he saw in The Dream, kept expecting to see crescents of dirt underneath his nails and blood on his hands.

Not even sitting on the bottom of the ocean had helped, and that, so far, had solved everything, even asking Annabeth to move in with him. The Dream continued to yield new information to him slowly; three days before his birthday he knew he was going to happen any day now. He finally had a timeframe and he had no doubt that what he was seeing would come to pass. There was no way it wasn't going to happen, not with how he had been dreaming about it, not with how real it felt. It was just a matter of time before whatever was going to happen happened, and it was getting closer every time he went to sleep. But he didn't _know. _He didn't have all the details so how was he supposed to stop it?

As he was laying in the park, in Annabeth's lap, his stomach ridiculously full of cake and sandwiches, he was having The Dream. He wasn't even properly asleep and yet The Dream had come leaping out of his subconscious to claim him, to fully reveal itself. Just when it was too late.

The Dream hadn't had that much detail in it up until now. Sure, there was the lake and the crispy grass, the monsters and Nico and Annabeth. But he was Poseidon's son; of course a body of water would reveal itself to him. As for the crispy grass and the blood and even Nico and Annabeth, he was touching them. That's why they'd been included, he guessed, even though the person who was bleeding out hadn't been, for an unknown, frustrating and scary reason. The monsters were all still vague — even though he could tell that they were _dracaenae_ it had only been a recent development — and he still couldn't tell what the largest monster of all was. In between all of those components, The Dream was just dark, swirling, purplish-blackish _space. _Voids.

Not this time. The Dream jumped and skipped and jerked, like an old film played by a bad projectionist, and suddenly, like the reverse effect of shaking an Etch A Sketch, the scene jolted into full Technicolor and all of the spaces were filled in. Looking around he choked out a squeaking sob of despair as everything became hideously clear.

There were trees. More grass. Blankets. An overturned hamper; ducks flapping up and away from the lake, the lake he now saw was Harlem Meer; dark clouds rolling in from the east; other people strolling or on bikes or walking the dog; an abandoned book… a book, slashed in two. The same book that he had been staring up at from Annabeth's lap as he dozed.

This was here and now. His birthday picnic.

He gulped, closing his eyes tight to try and avoid looking down at that spot, the spot he'd been staring at for so long that he had memorised every contour of the depressions the invisible person was making as they led on the grass.

Despite himself, he turned. He looked down. He saw. He knew.

Its purpose served, The Dream shattered as if it were composed entirely of mirrored walls straight out of a dance studio. It fractured into a million shards that spun away into nothingness, each piece containing a shred of The Dream, a shred of the image of the bleeding form in front of him.

The Dream finished its total collapse and Percy woke with a guttural scream.

* * *

Excessive whispering had driven Nico nearly mad. He knew by now that the dead would always be speaking to him and he, as a Son of Hades, would be an eavesdropper on all of these conversations until the day he died. And maybe it wouldn't even stop then, given the nature of it. He had learned to deal with the quiet chatter of the dead in his everyday life but this time, for disembodied voices that normally sounded no louder than autumn leaves gently tumbled along by a breeze, they were practically screaming like the rush of a subway train as it clamoured past a station without stopping. Nico could almost feel their excitement. Death and destruction were coming. Grimly he unsheathed his sword. He was damned if that was going to happen on his watch. Whatever monster turned up he would be ready to deal with. Didn't Percy deserve just one freaking nice day in his entire life after all?

No one was going to die here today if he could help it; he didn't care what the whispering voices were chattering on about inside his head. Just because they sensed that death was near didn't mean it had to be. He tried to step forwards out of the shadow of the trees but found he couldn't. The shadows were growing tendrils that were whipping their way towards him, snatching at his ankles and wrists until they were dragging him backwards.

He opened his mouth to yell but before the thought was even properly f0rmed inside his skull the shadows clamped themselves over his mouth to stop him. Not even his sword was any use against them, even though it normally could command anything that came out of the Underworld with ease — and let's face it: it was obvious enough that kidnapping shadows were straight out of the Underworld. He slashed and hacked anyway, listening to the blade of his sword swish through them uselessly. His feet were digging into the turf in a bid to maintain ground but his boots were leaving drag marks in the grass as he was forced back into the darkest area of shadows and compelled to dematerialise against his will.

* * *

Rachel's ride skidded to a halt, the sirens still blaring, in a totally illegal spot even for a police cruiser. Rachel had been convinced he was going to crash into the Duke Ellington statue when he had 'parked'; it had been a miracle everyone on the sidewalk had had such quick reaction times and had managed to get out of his way. He was sweating profusely and breathing hard, his hands clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. She had already unbuckled her seatbelt and dived out of the door, slamming it behind her.

"Thanks!" she said hastily. "I'll get my dad to mention this to the Mayor. He'll see what he can do. Gotta go, thanks, bye!" He had stopped in just the right place so that the Park was easily accessible and she sprinted to the north-east corner and towards Harlem Meer, the place she was sure she had painted in from her vision. Her Converse slapped against the path as she ran and she was acutely aware that the sole was coming off her left shoe. She elbowed through a stupid gaggle of slow-moving, picture-taking tourists and carried on running. Sweat was pouring off her when she finally skidded to a halt.

Not entirely sure how she had enough breath left in her body to do so, she yelled at the top of her lungs, "PERCY!" It was exactly in sync with the demigod in question as he sat up and let out a shout of his own.

"Percy? Rachel?" Sally asked, clutching her pearls at the jolt the screams had caused to shoot through her body. You never wanted your child to have to sound like that, so pained and desperate and frightened.

"GET DOWN!" Percy bellowed, scrambling to his feet but stumbling in his haste.

"RUN!" Rachel shouted, dashing towards them. "Get out of here!"

But she was too late. It was Annabeth who drew first blood in the battle, running a _dracaena _right through under the chin with her dagger and turning it to dust.

Mortals began to panic. Although the majority of them had been heading home anyway thanks to the ominous-looking clouds, leaving the park nowhere near filled to capacity, there were still plenty of people to scream. Some were falling over themselves in an attempt to run, others were frozen in shock, staring partly out of a hungry morbid curiosity. Percy had no idea what they were seeing through the Mist, but he hoped that it would hold; several mortals appeared to be recording the fight on their cell phones.

Sally turned, her mouth open as something huge swept down out of the sky at her. The sight of the monster knocked nearly all sense and notions of self-preservation out of her. The monster was enormous, with a scaly body more than twenty feet long and huge leathery bat wings; its dragon claws were wreathed hissing snakes. More snakes covered her head, cobras all stood up with their hoods flared open and their fangs bared. The arms of the human woman that made up the monster's top half were carrying two scimitars gleaming with acid green poison.

Sally managed to come to herself just in time to dive low and to the right, rolling out of the way. Even as she did so, however, she felt a searing pain in her shoulder and a disturbing numbness spread rapidly from the point down to the tips of her fingers. She reached up with her good hand to probe the wound and shrieked, finding half a dead snake, its fangs still sunk into her flesh. What was left of its body was oozing a green substance down her back. It had obviously bitten her and then, as the monster pulled up, had been plucked from its position like an unwanted hair. She grimaced, preparing herself to yank it out. It didn't hurt as much as she thought it would have, but that was probably something to do with the pins and needles rattling up and down her nerve endings. She threw the snake as far away from her as possible.

Percy skidded to a halt baseball-style in front of her after she had done this, putting one hand under her chin and the other on (fortunately) her good shoulder. "Mom, are you okay?" he asked, his eyes darting back and forth and desperately searching hers for reassurance.

"Fine," Sally said quickly, nodding tightly. "Not a scratch."

"Are you _sure_?" Percy said, moving his other hand down to her bad shoulder and giving her a slight shake in an attempt to get the whole truth out of her. "Really, are you okay? Nothing hurt at all?"

Sally hid the grimace of pain caused by Percy's touch and nodded. "Go, I'm _fine_," she lied. "Don't worry about me; I thought _I _was the one that was meant to worry."

"Definitely okay?" Percy asked desperately again. "Totally sure?"

"Of course," Sally said. "Honestly."

Percy breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay. Mom, you've got to get out of here, please. Don't ask me why, don't ask me how I know but you are in danger. Something really bad is going to happen to you if you stay here. Take Paul and go now before you get hurt. You can't… I can't… I don't want you to get hurt."

"We're surrounded Percy. I can't go anywhere. I'll be safest here. I know a trick or two — I can take care of myself, remember?" Over Percy's shoulder, she saw one of Annabeth's daggers go spinning away from her, knocked clear by one of the _dracaena_ she was fighting. "Go, Annabeth needs you."

Percy's head whipped round to look at Annabeth, but he still seemed torn between her and his mom. He _had_ to stop The Dream from coming true at any costs.

"I got her," Rachel said, dropping to her knees next to Sally.

"Have you even got a weapon?" Percy asked incredulously, just as a _dracaena _slithered at top speed towards them, her trident raised to impale Rachel. Riptide appeared in Percy's hand but before he could move green mist burst from Rachel's chest and swatted the _dracaena _like she was a particularly irritating mosquito_._ She simply winked out of existence.

Rachel shrugged nonchalantly. "Yeah... Uh, I discovered fairly recently that, although the Oracle isn't violent by nature, she's kind of keen on self-preservation. Especially given that last time her host died she got stuck in her for like seventy years. She was not fond of that, let me tell you. When I say _I've_ got this, I mean that she does. We'll be fine."

Percy took one last glance at her before running off towards Annabeth, swinging his sword in a wide arc that decapitated two _dracaenae_ at once. He felt a weapon glance off his own neck and turned, thrusting the point of Riptide into the culprit's face. Annabeth was fighting with just one dagger now, and Percy's breath hitched in his chest as he saw a _dracaena _gouge a deep cut up her forearm with a trident.

Still, Annabeth managed to yell at him over the clamour of the battle. "It's Kampê!" she said, flicking her head up to the sky. She plunged her dagger into one of the snake legs in front of her, distracting the _dracaena _for long enough for Percy to finish her off through a chink in her armour.

"Yeah, thanks for the update," Percy said tersely. "We'll be fine. Just go and get your knife—" he stopped to grunt as he threw out his arm to deflect a trident bearing down on Annabeth "—NOW!"

"Thanks, I never would have been able to figure that one out for myself," Annabeth said sarcastically, but still making a dive for her dagger.

"Just trying to help!" Percy said with a grin and shrug as Annabeth fought her way back over to him, standing with her back to his for a better defensive position. They circled like the well-practised team that they were, fending off advancing_ dracaenae._

"Not needed," Annabeth shot back at him. "I've been doing this since you were still tucked up in bed with your blankie, remember?"

"Gods, I love you," Percy said, reaching backwards with his free hand to squeeze her hip affectionately.

The smile Annabeth hadn't let Percy see faded from her face. "Percy, what are we going to do?" she asked. Percy could tell that, despite her bravado, she was genuinely scared. "Is there even a plan of action for this? This isn't just some monster that we've offed in the past. It's _Kampê._ We nearly died back on Alcatraz and we weren't even fighting her, we were just running for our lives."

Kampê bellowed again and Percy and Annabeth ducked in unison as she flew over their heads, raking her claws down for them. She actually slaughtered several _dracaenae_ as she did so — clearly, she didn't care who or what got in her way; she just wanted revenge for being banished to Tartarus. But now she had broken free, and Percy and Annabeth could feel the air bubbling and sizzling in the wake of her poisonous scimitars.

"I will get you, demigods! Don't think I've forgotten what you did!" Kampê snarled at them as she readied herself for another flyby, this one even lower and forcing Annabeth and Percy onto their stomachs.

A net came hissing through the air their heads; Percy sliced it to shreds. Getting an idea, plucked up a net left behind by a dead _dracaena _and threw it, entangling several of them up at once. He leapt towards them but Tyson got there first, jumping in with a yell and pretty much tenderising the entrapped _dracaenae_ to death with another huge paving stone identical to the one that he'd just skipped across the Meer. Points for effectiveness, Percy thought, even if it was as messy as all Hades. The armour of the _dracaenae _was buckling under Tyson's blows as if it were tinfoil and not bronze.

Percy turned back around to see that Annabeth blocking a trident from piercing her face. "Tyson," he said to her.

She picked up his plan from the single word and nodded. "Do it."

"Tyson!" Percy yelled, sticking his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistling as his half-brother. "Hey, man!"

Tyson had found a manhole cover from the gods only knew where and he flung it like a discus, mowing down a line of five _dracaenae _at once. Unsurprisingly, none of them got up. Now he was done he turned to Percy, pausing to casually slam a huge fist down on a _dracaena's _head, ploughing her into the ground.

"We need Briares!" Percy yelled to him. "Can you get back to Dad's palace through the lake?"

"I cannot leave you, brother!" Tyson said, shaking his head with his eye wide in shock. "No, you need me! I fight!"

"Can you fight _her_?" Percy asked, gesturing at the wheeling Kampê high above.

Tyson nodded and, even though Percy's question had been rhetorical, and grabbed the _dracaena _he had just conked on the head by the tips of her snake legs. He spun her like he was in the hammer throw (_damn _there were a lot of Olympic events Tyson would kick ass at) until she had reached enough of a velocity for him to fling her skywards at Kampê. Even though the bear at her waist snatched the _dracaena _out of the air and chewed her to ribbons, armour and all, Tyson had still managed to get Kampê's attention. She roared and plunged down at him. Tyson crouched and the sprung onto her tail, managing to avoid the snakes and cling on. Kampê snarled and bucked and thrashed as Tyson hammered at her with what Percy realised was a gigantic blacksmith's hammer. Tyson was wearing his rucksack again and no wonder it had been so heavy — he had brought his entire toolset with him.

The hammer came off worse for wear, however; the handle splintered, flinging the head way up into the air to crash down through the roof of the Dana Discovery Centre. Percy hoped that the building wouldn't have to be watertight for a while. Undeterred, Tyson was still clinging on — apparently he had his blacksmith tongs at the ready too and was stabbing at Kampê's hide with them. When that had no effect he started snipping off snakes from around her legs, ignoring the venom that was splashing onto his skin. Kampê couldn't twist far enough to get him with her scimitars and dead snakes began to rain down on Central Park.

As he attacked, Tyson finally discovered a weak spot in her scales and stabbed his tongs in, wriggling them for maximum damage until Kampê, with a final huge buck, tossed Tyson off her back and down to the ground. He hit the ground hard, leaving an actual crater about six inches deep.

His tongs had been completely burnt away by poison and led uselessly at his side as he shook himself with no indication that he had just fallen thirty feet. "I will go and get Briares," he decided a little disappointedly. "I cannot kill her. I do not have enough hands for this."

"You tried, Tyson. Hey, you kicked ass. Don't worry about it! Just go for reinforcements, you did the best you could!" Percy called.

Tyson nodded. "Tyson will be as quick as he can! Never fear, brother." He took off towards the Meer at a run and dived in, not surfacing again.

Kampê had backed off a little, more cautious now she was bleeding. She was still circling but higher now, not as willing to risk exposing herself to harm. Perhaps she was hoping that the _dracaenae _would do the job for her.

Percy turned back to his mom. She was standing with the giant cake knife readied in her hand. Sally was pale and trembling, but that was hardly surprising given the situation. Rachel was standing next to her, occasionally shooting mist that poofed monsters out of existence but it looked like she was tiring fast. Sally ducked low and plunged the knife twice into a relatively undefended scaly leg, causing the _dracaena _to screech in pain. Paul came running to her aid just then, yanking off the _dracaena's_ helmet and cracking her on the top of her head with the empty bottle of sparkling cider. Then, wielding the bottle like a baseball bat, he smashed her full in the face, shattering it. Percy's stepfather rammed the tiny jagged portion of the neck of the bottle he had been left with through the monster's eye socket and she vanished into a cloud of dust.

Percy turned away at the sound of panpipe music, missing his mother sitting down heavily on the upturned picnic hamper and the knife falling limply from her hand.

Grover was playing his pipes frantically; even with all of his experience his face was reddening as he blew. Across the park, nets began to burst into showers of withered autumn leaves. He blew even harder and set to work on the tridents, but as the first few began to turn into lilies Kampê swooped down again over the battlefield, swinging her tail to turn a small group of trees into matchsticks. She hadn't been aiming for Grover (Percy knew that he'd be dead if she were), just bent on causing destruction, but still a large bough came flying at Grover, knocking him to the floor.

"Grover!" Annabeth shrieked, but was immediately calmed as she saw the satyr groan and shift slightly. He was just unconscious and she knew from experience that he had a very thick skull. "Where the hell is Nico?" she demanded, rounding on Percy as if he were hiding him. "He has no problem summoning skeletal minions to make him breakfast but when it comes to a fight when we could really use an undead army, where is he?"

Percy frowned. "Nico wouldn't be missing this on purpose," he grunted as he killed another_ dracaena. _"Something must be wrong."

"No kidding," Annabeth growled as she killed the monster she had been fighting with. "We're down a cyclops, a satyr and a son of Hades and these _dracaenae _keep coming. Plus their tridents are starting to not be flowers anymore… Gotta admit, even I'm struggling for a plan here."

The tridents Grover had started to transfigure were turning back, but Percy got a brain wave and leapt through some _dracaenae_, ignoring their thrusts and stabs — his body was doing more damage to the tridents anyway as tines bent against his skin — and stopping in front of the box that held his own trident. He casually flicked Riptide, stabbing a _dracaena_ into dust and kicked off the stone lid.

"Okay. Let's see what you can do," he muttered, turning around quickly and watching the trident begin to glow. "How's this for a plan?" he said to Annabeth, grinning wildly as he stabbed a monster in the chest, piercing her armour with ease. She blew apart with a spray of saltwater and golden monster dust. Suddenly, Nico came tumbling out of thin air practically on top of him, righting himself and finishing off the _dracaena _Percy had been aiming for with his sword.

"What took so freaking long?" Percy demanded. "We've been fighting for our lives here!"

"Family disagreement. I'll explain later," Nico bit out. "What's happening? How are we doing?" He paused as Kampê's shadow passed over them, looking up reluctantly because he knew what he was about to see couldn't be good. "Oh, okay, so yeah. That's Kampê. Stupid question. We're totally screwed. Thanks for getting me up to speed."

"No problem," Percy said. "Ideas, plans, strategies, anything useful?"

"Yeah, no one die," Nico said. "My dad is pretty pissed right about now." He stopped to stab a charging_ dracaena. _"It would be poor timing to go down there any time soon."

"So, useless as usual then," Percy said good-naturedly as he accidentally used too much force and took off a_ dracaena's _head with his trident, shooting a wasted fountain of saltwater across the grass.

"Hey—" Nico was cut off by a strangled yelp as he was grabbed from behind by his shirt, ripping it down the front. The tip of a trident tore a long gash from his sternum diagonally towards his shoulder before he managed to get his sword into play and kill the _dracaena _holding him.

"Son of a _bitch_," Nico hissed as the cut began to burn and ooze blood. "Son of a two-dollar, syphilitic _whore._"

"Quite a mouth you've got on you there," Percy said with a grin. "I've gotta remember that one."

"That's it," Nico spat. "Let's see. I'm in a mood for a few dozen soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars today." He clenched his fist and was about to summon them when Annabeth screamed. They both whipped around to see her standing but sagging with pain and heavily favouring her left leg.

Nico and Percy leapt after her, but Nico was downed by a flying net on the way and snarled up in it. He hit the ground hard, splitting open his chin and popping a tooth through his lip. He managed to manoeuvre onto his back just in time to see a trident heading for his neck. His sword had gone skittering across the grass when he fell and so he had to squirm onto his side, taking the middle point of the trident in his upper arm. He screamed in pain, feeling the metal squeak against his humerus as it came to a jolting and searingly painful halt. A wave of nausea washed over him and he gulped bile back down into his stomach, screwing his eyes closed against the pain until it was halfway bearable.

Annabeth was suddenly crouched next to him, her bad leg extended awkwardly to accommodate this position, slicing away at the net with her knife while Percy ran the _dracaena _through with his trident. As she worked, Nico noticed that they'd actually taken out a lot of the _dracaenae _and the ones that were left were backing away and regrouping. As she finished freeing him, Nico noticed Annabeth had a nosebleed, a head wound and a split on her cheekbone that rivalled the one on his chin.

"Nice of you to join us," Annabeth said as she finished working on the net. "Late as usual I see."

"Hey, I've already had this from Percy. It wasn't my fault," Nico groused, getting to his feet but immediately doubling over as a new wash of pain from his arm hit him.

"Dislocated knee," Annabeth said from the floor, gesturing at her weirdly-shaped right kneecap.

"Trident stabbed so far in I think it's chipped off most of the bone," Nico countered with.

They both considered for a few moments before shrugging, Nico with only one shoulder. "It's a draw," they both agreed in unison.

"I can't believe you're both still playing 'Who's got the worst war wound?'," Percy said, rolling his eyes.

"You're just jealous because you can't join in," Nico said. "Not so fun being invulnerable now, is it?"

Percy looked over to where Paul, Rachel and Sally had been standing the last time he had looked. Paul was about twenty feet away, slumped against a tree out cold. Rachel was sprawled on the grass also. He checked for his mom and his blood ran cold. Right before his eyes, his dream was coming true.

His mom was lying on the grass, next to the hamper and the blankets, and she was bleeding.

* * *

**DELETED SCENE**

To go just after the paragraph that says that Annabeth had been to consult with Rachel.

* * *

Annabeth had seen him thrash around in his sleep, moaning and even whimpering and there was nothing she could do but hug him when he woke. He wouldn't tell her anything and so one day she went to the place every demigod went to when they wanted to know something. He wouldn't tell her and she couldn't help him unless she knew what was going on.

As she rode the private elevator up to the penthouse suite of what was arguably the most expensive and exclusive hotel in the city, watching the numbers light up in ascending order, Annabeth idly wondered what the heroes of old would think of her now. They trekked for miles in the scorching Greek sun and had to climb halfway up a mountain and into a cave to get their prophecies. She was on a way with a push of a button, although admittedly after the guy behind the desk had called up to Rachel whilst keeping his beady eye on her, almost as if he could smell the lack of money on her and was making sure she wasn't going to steal any of the fixtures or fittings. Granted, that perception was probably aided by the fact that she was carrying a Payless bag with a misshapen bundle in it, but that didn't change the fact that the guy was clearly a dick.

When the elevator door opened in the penthouse, Rachel was sat on the floor in the middle of the massive suite with a canvas on her lap and a plate of curly fries on the coffee table next to her. She was scowling at the canvas and occasionally popping another fry in her mouth, all to Mozart's _Violin Concerto No. 5_ blaring from an iPod dock attached to what was perhaps the biggest TV Annabeth had ever seen. She had been in movie theatres with smaller screens.

"Hey," Annabeth tried, breaking Rachel out of the little head-bobbing dance move she was doing to the song. Rachel looked up at her and twisted her mouth into something that may have been a smile but was so unwelcoming Annabeth stopped in her tracks. "Bad time?" she asked as Rachel's iPod switched tracks, treating them to Dolly Parton's _9 to 5_.

Rachel sighed, using a mini remote to turn the music down. "No. You're fine. I'm just sitting here thinking about how much I suck." She took another fry from the plate morosely and put it in her mouth, licking her finger and thumb afterwards.

Annabeth wondered whether it was ketchup or paint on the bridge of Rachel's nose. "You okay?" she asked uncertainly as Rachel continued to glare at the painting in her lap.

"No," Rachel said shortly. "Like I sad, I _suck._" She flipped round the painting to show Annabeth, holding it slightly to her left so she could peer around the side and take it in. "I mean, look. The shadows turned out all wrong and I don't even know what's up with the perspective."

Given that Annabeth may well have cried in joy and accomplishment if she'd painted what Rachel was holding up, she stayed quiet. Screw the fridge; that painting ought to be stuck up on a wall in a freaking gallery. "It's…" she began, but was saved from answering as the opening bars of some death metal burst through the volume restriction Rachel had put on the iPod and drowned her out.

Rachel jammed her thumb down on the remote again, cutting the music. Then she picked up the silver knife that room service had, for some mysterious reason, provided to eat the curly fries with and stabbed it through the middle of the painting. Annabeth actually gasped, reaching out towards Rachel as the redhead began slashing the canvas from its frame.

"I suck," she said again, getting to her feet and dusting the scraps of canvas from her jeans. There was a piece lodged in the gaping rip at one of the knees but she hadn't noticed. "And now the world doesn't need to know," she said, brightening up.

"I guess… we're all our own harshest critics?" Annabeth tried, looking perplexed as Rachel stepped over the empty frame, not forgetting to snag a handful of fries on the way.

"Feh," Rachel said through a mouthful, shrugging. "Let's not talk about it. So, why are you here?" She rolled her eyes at Annabeth's cocked eyebrow. "Come on, don't give me that eyebrow. I don't know _everything._" Annabeth switched eyebrows and Rachel smiled. "Okay, so I know this time. But like I said, not always. Is it really bad?"

Annabeth sighed and collapsed into the armchair next to her, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. Percy wasn't the only one getting a severe lack of sleep, but at least he knew _why_. "I was hoping you could tell me," she said, pulling a hoodie and a toothbrush out of her Payless bag and holding them out to Rachel.

"A hoodie and a toothbrush," Rachel commented flatly, frowning. "You're his girlfriend and you couldn't liberate something with a little bit more of a connection that this?"

"Look, Percy's not one to get attached to material possessions," Annabeth said snappily. "Seeing as how there's no way I could get Riptide off him, girlfriend or not, this was the best I could do. Percy's been wearing this hoodie every single morning down to the beach practically since the dreams started."

Rachel wrinkled her nose as she took the objects from Annabeth. "Yeah, no kidding," she said dryly. "Thanks for taking the time to, you know, launder it and stuff so it wouldn't be totally gross when you handed it to me."

"Just prophesise with them already," Annabeth said. "The sooner we find out what's messing with him so badly the sooner the both of us can get a decent night of sleep."

"Yeah. We wouldn't want you to get grouchy," Rachel muttered, closing her eyes to avoid the glare she was sure had been shot in her direction. "Okay. Here we go." She exhaled and went quiet for a few minutes, the creases on her forehead getting deeper and deeper the longer she stood there. When she opened her eyes, she looked troubled.

"Well?" Annabeth said.

Rachel handed the hoodie and the toothbrush back to her. "I don't know," she admitted. "I… blood, definitely. And sort of pain and fear but only maybe. I can't tell you much else, I'm sorry. It's a dream. It's not like it's something real that I can do a little bit of psychic eavesdropping on."

Annabeth looked disappointed and worried. The answer she'd been hoping for had firstly been a definite one, and secondly one that involved something more along the lines of sunshine, puppies and lollipops, not blood, pain and fear. "Well, thanks for trying," she said, defeated. "I just wish he would tell me, you know? I'm his girlfriend. Why won't he let me help him?"

"Maybe he will when he's ready," Rachel said simply with a shrug. "You can't force it out of him. You're doing that thing that you do where you think you can fix everything. And he's doing that thing that he does where he tries to save his friends by taking burdens on himself." She paused. "Huh. You know, if this is a glimpse of the rest of your lives, I'm seeing a lot of marriage counselling in the future."

Annabeth was too tired and preoccupied to return fire, especially given that Rachel was pretty much right. About the fatal flaws coming into play, not the marriage counselling. She didn't need to pay someone $300 an hour to tell them to listen and communicate more. What else was she supposed to do other than trust that Percy would come to her when he was ready? "Thanks again," she said dejectedly, turning back to the elevator.

"It'll be okay," Rachel said as the doors to the elevator clattered open.

"Is that a message from the Oracle?" Annabeth asked.

"Nope. That's just one of those messages from friends where they lie because they think the fact that they don't know, which is the truth, isn't as nice for the other person to here."

Annabeth gave a small snort of laughter. "You're direct, Dare. I'll give you that." She stepped into the elevator. "Oh, by the way. Why are you living in a hotel? Isn't that kind of extravagant, even for you?"

"Not really, not when you own it," Rachel said matter-of-factly, laughing at Annabeth's surprised stare. "Didn't I tell you? This place came with a giant tag attached to it that said, 'Happy 21st Birthday, Rachel. Here's a building in lieu of affection. Knock yourself out!'"

"Well, as birthday gifts go…" Annabeth said faintly. "I've had worse."

Rachel paused, then got in the elevator next to Annabeth. "You know what? Hit the button for the lobby. It's fun to see the staff hop to it when the boss comes downstairs."


	5. Chapter 5

**I'm not sure how this chapter feels. I'm not very good at actually feeling stuff, so I don't know if this is actually any kind of genuine portrayal really. Plus, you can tell I'm out of practice thanks to the long period between updates because I'm fairly sure that they're all wildly OOC in this and I just don't remember how to fix that. I think this will be my last PJO fic, at least until I've read the series again anyway, because I'm having trouble with writing them.**

**So the chapter is there, knock yourself out. Any and every comment is welcome but not expected and I hope it's not as big a disappointment as it feels like it is to me. Also, with any reviews, please send heat. It will not stop snowing!**

**Once again, I own neither the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series or the lyrics from the below song (The World's Gonna End by Johnny Clueless).**

**

* * *

**

_**The world's gonna end on somebody's birthday;**_

_**The sky's gonna fall on somebody's cake.**_

_**The world's got to end on somebody's birthday (yeah).**_

_**I don't mean to bear all the bad news, I don't mean to bring anyone down,**_

_**But the truth of it is that one of us is going to have the last party in town.**_

_**So sad to say,**_

_**But you have to come to grips.**_

_**So sorry to say: Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday.**_

_**

* * *

**_

Percy was at his mother's side so fast that he didn't even remember moving. His mouth dried out quicker than any desert as the blood pounded in his ears, deafening him to anything around him except for Sally's laboured breathing. He couldn't stop his jaw going slack as he dropped quickly to his knees, checking her over with shaking hands. When he lifted her slightly her head lolled back and he saw the whites of her eyes for a minute or so until her irises flicked back around, focussing on him as she lifted her head. She smiled weakly and her hand darted out, snatching his with surprising speed and strength given her condition.

"Mom…" Percy began, no further words coming as he felt the hand she wasn't holding become warm and slippery with the blood that was pouring from her shoulder and back. He shuffled up a little so that her head was in his lap and it brought back pangs of all the times he had nestled in her lap as a child. Even through the moving, which couldn't have been comfortable, Sally kept her fierce grip on his hand.

"Percy," Sally said, still smiling up at him but in a tight, pained way, stretching a brave face over what was beneath. "Oh, Percy… my baby. I'm so sorry." She was crying, partly from the stabbing pains jangling along her nerves to every extremity that she still had feeling in but also because of what she knew was coming next.

"What for?" Percy choked out, his eyes already shimmering with unshed tears of his own. "What have you got to be sorry for?"

Sally didn't speak for a while, grimacing every time she tried. It was long enough for five skeletons to claw their way out of the ground and surround them, facing outwards in a guard of honour_. _Just then, Nico elbowed his way past the skeletons impatiently; Annabeth was leaning heavily on him and his sword was trailing limply behind him from his good arm. When Annabeth saw Sally lying in Percy's lap, blood from her shoulder rapidly darkening the legs of Percy's cut-off jeans, Nico felt Annabeth's nails dig into the arm she was leaning on. She took a sharp intake of breath and wobbled dangerously, her face paling and crumpling all at once as her mouth slackened at the scene before her.

Nico dropped his sword to the floor with a hollow thud against the frazzled, hard-packed earth. In his ears he could here the whisperings of the invisible dead getting louder and louder, more and more excitable as they came closer to swelling their ranks by one. Unseen to all but him, a dark haze was beginning to billow around Sally's body. Something clenched in his chest as soon as he spotted it and once he'd seen it, he couldn't take his eyes off it as it grew in strength as Sally's failed.

Four of his skeleton minions began fitting bone-tipped arrows three or four at a time into their longbows and taking wide, arcing shots up at Kampê to keep her at bay, no arrows ever doing much damage save maybe for nailing a snake head or two: it was purely a defensive move. The fifth skeleton began to take care of the _dracaenae, _which were still massing in their regrouping effort. His arrows drained their essence when they hit, piercing their armour, and one by one they winked out of existence.

"For your birthday," Sally murmured eventually, a small frown creasing her forehead as she looked up at him. "For this, for me, for your birthday..." Her voice became hoarse; she swallowed hard and once again she couldn't speak again for a few seconds. "I'm sorry for your birthday, Percy. I didn't ever want to ruin it."

"How are you ruining it?" Percy bit out indignantly, a sob hitching in his throat and distorting the last word. "Why are you saying that?"

Sally's breath actually rattled when she next inhaled and she closed her eyes briefly, searching for some tiny glimmer of strength left inside her that would let her carry on speaking long enough to say as much of a goodbye to her son as she had time left to do. "I don't think I have long, Percy. I'd never choose this as the memory that's going to stick with you for the rest of your birthdays."

"You're going to be around for the rest of my birthdays," Percy said determinedly though gritted teeth, despite the tear that dripped from his jaw line. "Why are you saying that?" he demanded again, doggedly ignoring all that was blatant in front of him.

Sally sighed, and for a second all three of them thought an inhale wouldn't follow; subconsciously they craned forwards, expecting the worse. However, Sally drew breath again eventually, after an agonisingly long time. It gave life to an even fainter, breathier voice than she had spoken in before. Still, she managed to put as much force behind her words as she could muster, looking her son in the eye and gripping his hand the tightest she had yet. "I'm bleeding, Percy. Badly. I got bitten by a snake and something tells me that there's no antivenin in the world for the kind that did it. Don't lie to yourself and don't lie to me. I'm still your mother even if I'm dying."

"Stop saying that!" Percy yelled totally inadvertently, letting it fly from his lips way louder then he had meant to, before he could stop it. He looked wildly over to Annabeth, his eyes a type of feral she had never seen before. "Annabeth, get me some nectar."

"Percy—" Annabeth began, finding her voice finally, even if it was husky and partially muted with tears.

"NOW!" Percy growled.

Annabeth could feel his green eyes practically burning down to her soul despite the sheen of tears covering them. She shook her head reluctantly at him, dislodging two tears of her own that raced each other over the hump of her cheekbones. "Percy, she's mortal. If she has nectar, she'll burn. You _know_ that."

"If she doesn't she'll _die_!" Percy shouted. "Please, Annabeth. She can see through the Mist, she gave birth to a demigod, she might be okay."

"I'm sorry," Annabeth said simply, letting go of Nico to wrap her arms around herself, shrinking behind them. What else was there to say?

Percy's head whipped back to his mom as she murmured and shifted her head in his lap. Her eyes were closed and Percy felt like a slap of cold water had dashed him across the face for just a second before she finally inhaled, but she still didn't open her eyes.

"This can't be happening," Percy said to himself, to anyone that could hear, his voice cracking. His mother had been the one constant in his life — through Gabe, through discovering he was a demigod; he went to Hades and back for her after the Minotaur and she had never abandoned him, not through the slog that was his final years at high school, not through college, the acceptance, the achievements… "She can't die," Percy insisted once again to anyone who would listen, clutching her closer to his stomach as if that would anchor her to the mortal world through him.

Without warning, Kampê plummeted down at them, her long body rotating in a spiral as she did so. Annabeth and Nico ducked as she took the head off three of the skeletons. Nico felt the tug of something born from his demigod powers being partially destroyed, but instead of collapsing the skeletons kept firing, their shots going ridiculously wide until their companions unceremoniously shoved the skulls back onto their spinal columns.

Annabeth felt like someone had reached into her chest and was tearing her heart into confetti with their fingertips. She was clutching a closed fist to her throat and had given up trying to stem the flow of tears down her face, her shoulders hitching erratically with the occasional sob. Kampê's screams of rage as she flew overhead, thwarted by the regenerating skeletons, and even the deep, crashing rumbles of thunder seemed to have been dimmed to a dull, background hiss. The day was getting darker and darker as the clouds above them began to turn into the ugly green and yellow mix of an old bruise. Lightning leapt from cloud to cloud almost exactly at the same time as the thunder boomed. The storm was practically overhead.

Nico could only watch as Percy began to rock infinitesimally back and forth with Sally's head still in his lap and the dark mist surged around her, nearly covering her. More and more tendrils were rising from the ground all the time, bursting open like rapidly blooming and wilting flowers or the jets of a fountain before settling back down towards her. Sally had been so good to him over the years; she had been there when he had had nothing and no one. At times, when he felt as if he had nothing and no one, she had been a surrogate mother figure when he had needed one the most.

The woman had so much love and affection to dole out, an inexhaustible supply of kindness, good humour, compassion and grace and Nico felt pangs of guilt rising within him as he realised he had never thanked her enough for all she had done for him. There had been thanks at the time, sure, because no matter how he was raised and how quickly Bianca's parenting had come to end end, she had never let him get away without any manners, but not the true thanks that Sally deserved. He had never let her know just how grateful he was that she had never told anyone of the times he had come to her practically in tears, lost and lonely and having experienced 'parenting' at the hands of some particular immortals that didn't even deserve to be named as parents next to her. Sally was just the complete opposite of his father, even now when Hades had become much more fond of him than this time a decade ago. She was never disappointed in him, she never cocked her head and narrowed her eyes as if his actions and emotions were both a mystery to her and beneath her.

He owed it to her not to look away, even as she began to inhale the black, smoky aura that was still unseen by anyone but him. He had seen a lot of death over the years, but he rarely watched after this part. The moment the dying person began to breathe in that brume that would eventually take them down to his father's domain was so personal. He was watching it invade their body and dislodge their soul. So he never looked past this part because even to him dying was a kind of sacred thing, so ridiculously, painfully private and intimate. But this time he owed it to Sally to watch as her soul was reaped because of who she was and all she had done for him. The least he could do was stick with her until the end. The wind from the storm began to gust towards him, rapidly drying the tears on his cheeks that he hadn't even realised were coming into sticky, salty streams.

"Please, please, please..." Percy was mumbling over and over again, apparently unable to get any other words out. Never in his life had he felt more hopeless and powerless than now, not in any of his battles, not through near death experiences too numerous to even count. He was totally invincible but nothing could save him from what he was experiencing inside right now. To him, his mother pretty much resembled everything that was good about the world he lived in, more so than Olympus, than Camp, than anyone he had met, mortal or immortal. All of that meant nothing though because here she was, lying in his lap with her warm blood running down his thighs, leaking from jeans saturated to bursting point. It was creeping up the hem of his t-shirt also, blossoming through the green cotton and staining it an ugly brown.

Nico's throat bobbed as he swallowed, knowing what was coming next as the haze began to disappear, entering Sally's slack mouth and her nostrils. When the smoke left her body again, there was nothing anyone could do to save her.

"Dad, I know you can hear me and I know that you love her!" Percy yelled desperately at the sky. "Please fix this! You have to fix this for me. Please. Please, please, please, please, please..." He was back to the hopeless begging again in a tiny, plaintive voice — it was all he had to give.

Nico gritted his teeth as Sally began to gently exhale and the mist started worming its way out of her mouth. He still didn't look away, even though he wanted desperately to be anywhere else but here and now, looking at anything else, hearing something other than a slight gurgling in Sally's chest. He reached out for Annabeth instead; this time it was his nails' turn to leave half-crescent indentations on the skin of her arm. He was trying to draw strength enough from her to stay, but the uncharacteristic motion made Annabeth turn to him, her small confused frown widening outwards to a look of pure horror and dismay as she read his expression. She shook her head in a begging way, demanding Nico tell her something else other than what she had gleaned from his face. Nico couldn't do anything but press his lips together and nod gently and he practically felt Annabeth's body melt into grief as she looked back at Sally.

The ground was rapidly absorbing the darkness that had been swirling around Sally — Nico knew that she had only seconds left to live. As always happened when someone around him died, the image of the Fates' shears sawing at the person's thread of life with their dull, blunted blades inundated his head. Sally was exhaling the mist more rapidly now and he knew what was next and cast his eyes downward.

Then, suddenly, she took another gasping breath and his head snapped back up, his heart leaping and pounding; no one ever breathed again after that last, smoky exhale. That was normally it. Had Percy's prayers been heard and answered?

Sally opened her eyes and Percy saw them focus on his face. She looked at him absolutely determinedly even as her grip on his hand faded and her lips parted, allowing a trickle of blood to brim from the corner of her mouth. "I love you," she said, her voice like a breath of wind. "Remember Percy. I love you and I'll always love you. No matter what, I won't be gone. I love you so much..."

And then the last exhale came and Nico shuddered, finally allowing his eyes to close. His eyelids squeezed extra tears from his eyes as he shut them and he felt one drop from his chin to explode on his shoe. Whoever had answered Percy's prayer has obviously pulled enough strings to give Sally that one last inhale to say goodbye, but that was as far as they had been able to go.

Sally's hand slipped from Percy's and her arm fell limply to the ground. Her eyes glazed over, becoming glassy. Her mouth was still open and as her head flopped backwards a little more blood dribbled from her lips.

"NO!" Percy screamed, shaking his mother's shoulders. "No, no. No, please. Mom, you're fine, come on please, you'll be fine, just don't... don't die. You're not allowed to die. You're not, you're not..." He didn't care about how much of a child he sounded like right now, losing his head right out in the open in front of anyone who was watching — he actually felt like one all over again. The adult he was had been formed more than he realised by his mother's love and care and now she was gone he could feel it falling apart. Apparently all that he was had been a fragile illusion propped up and heavily underpinned by Sally; without her, he felt completely lost. What was there left in the world, in him, without his mother?

This wasn't like other deaths that he had seen in battle. They always hit him afterwards because there was no time right away. Lying in bed the night after Beckendorf had died on the cruise ship, the look on Silena's face as it completely shattered at the news wouldn't leave him. Nor would his final glimpse over his shoulder as he dived over the rail and left the son of Hephaestus to sacrifice himself to protect the world from Kronos. It was then that he felt Beckendorf's death the most — then, when there were no distractions or life-threatening situations or an army of people to lead. As harsh as it sounded, grieving came so far down the list when you were fighting in a battle that it was practically on a tiny sub-list of its own — it was much more important to stay focussed, stay strong and to remind yourself that you were fighting to avenge the fallen and prevent such deaths in the future.

But now he was no one's leader. He wasn't required to hold it together so people would believe in him and his leadership. He wasn't Olympus's general anymore, or even a demigod, just Percy Jackson, son of Sally Jackson, a woman who was lying dead in his lap. So it was as Percy Jackson that he fell to pieces, had chance to fall to pieces, and he grabbed hold of the opportunity, it being the only feasible one.

Nico hadn't let his grip on Annabeth's arm falter, but now her free hand was on top of his. He opened his eyes to discover his vision completely blurred with tears. Swiping them angrily off his cheek he looked at Annabeth who was unashamedly and openly crying, tears pouring from her eyes so fast he couldn't see individual drops, just rivers flowing tainted with the mascara she had forced onto herself in honour of Percy's birthday.

"We should close her eyes," Annabeth murmured, letting go of Nico to stumble and limp forwards towards him. Splaying the leg with her bad knee awkwardly she managed to make her way down to the floor next to Percy and Sally's head. She gently placed her hand on Sally's eyes, drawing them closed for the last time. Then, gently, she managed to lift Sally slightly from Percy's lap and lay her to rest on the ground.

She threw her arms around Percy and hugged him as tight as she could, resting her chin in the hollow between Percy's collarbone and his shoulder. He didn't hug her back but then she didn't expect him to right away. Instead, he just stared uncomprehendingly at his hands, which were dark red with blood. He opened and closed them a few times, almost as if he could perform some kind of vanishing trick and the blood would be back in his mom's body where it belonged, but it remained on his hands. Balling his bloody hands into fists once more he shrugged Annabeth off him with enough force to nearly knock her backwards and rose quickly to his feet, his eyes behind his tears gleaming greedily as they landed on Nico.

Nico took a deep breath. He knew what was next and he knew it wouldn't be easy; it wasn't the first time that demigods had sought him out when loved ones had died, begging him for a way to get them back, pledging him anything and everything they had to persuade him. He was forced to tell them all the same thing, that he couldn't snap his fingers and reanimate dead relatives or friends. That wasn't the way death worked, but he wasn't sure that Percy would let that wash. The Percy in front of him right now was bordering on terrifying; he had never seen him look like this. He could practically feel the waves of emotions broadcasting from him.

"Nico," Percy began, an almost deranged, desperate smile hitching the corners of his mouth up. "Nico... Come on, you know me. You know my mom. You know that she shouldn't be dead right now, don't you? You know she doesn't deserve this and if you can just..." He took a deep shuddering breath in, not finishing his sentence but not needing to. Nico already understood and was shaking his head.

"I can't," Nico said, biting his bottom lip after speaking to induce a sharp pain that reminded him to keep it together. "Percy, you know that that's not how it works. You do — deep down, you know that no one can come back from this."

"She treated you like a SON!" Percy suddenly bellowed, spit flying from his lips as he pointed his finger back at his dead mother. "Did you know that? She practically thought of you as _family _and now you give me this order of the universe bullshit? No, Nico. That is total and utter fucking... _shit. _This isn't just anyone. This is my _mom._"

"There aren't exceptions," Annabeth said quietly, awkwardly getting to her feet. "Please don't do this, Percy." She put her arm around him but he shrugged her off again and she was forced to put her full weight on her dislocated knee to stay balanced. She screamed in pain, spots dancing in front of her eyes as her body tried to black out to save her from the agony shooting through her knee.

"You," Percy seethed, his face curled into an ugly, dark expression that Nico had never seen before. He strode forwards and grabbed Nico by the tatters of his shirt, actually managed to haul the younger demigod a few inches off the ground. "You can fix this, dammit," he said, his face very close to Nico's. "What good is it being who you are if you can't?"

Nico could feel his cousin shaking even though Percy was barely touching him, but was saved from answering temporarily as the shreds of his shirt finally gave way and he fell to the ground with a painful thud. Percy didn't generally get angry or violent — at least, not at anyone that wasn't a monster, so this was a whole world of strange and scary for Nico. He knew that Percy wasn't angry at him specifically, rather death, Kampê and himself — he was just in pain. Desperation also played a really big part in it; Percy just wanted more than anything else for Sally not to be lying behind him dead. There was no genuine malice behind his actions, just a haunted look of complete desolation and devastation. Percy had broken and Nico could see it in his face.

Percy still had a fistful of shredded black cotton from Nico's shirt, which he dropped absently, letting them flutter to the ground. He sagged, dabbing his eyes with the heels of his palms and trying to stem the flow of the tears that were building there. When Percy finally uncovered his eyes, Nico could see that he had failed. It was with green irises wobbling behind tears that he stared back at Nico once more.

"Please," he said quietly, his voice cracking and the rest of the exhale after the monosyllable coming out in three or four hitching breaths. "Just... _please._"

Nico didn't have enough strength to get up off the ground. The adrenaline surge from the battle had long since dissipated and it was an emotional exhaustion that was weighing him down more than anything. With all of his experience of death, this was the most wrought he had ever felt afterwards; it felt like someone had reached inside him and gouged out a piece of him with talons. It brought memories of Bianca crashing back to him, how he had felt when Percy told him that she wasn't coming back, that he didn't even have any physical evidence that she had ever been on the planet, how he was never going to get to bury her to gain even the smallest amount of closure. That had been bad but this was worse; he hadn't seen Bianca take her last breath, he hadn't been proximate to his sister's demise and he was just a child – what kind of comprehension of their emotional range can a nine-year-old really have?

With another boom of thunder the rain began, huge, heavy drops hurtling towards the ground from the clouds and dashing themselves to pieces on every surface they found. The drops came faster and faster until they were blurred together; in some places it was as if there were solid sheets of water sluicing down, sometimes obscuring each other from view. Everything was soon sodden except for Percy. The grass and dirt beneath them was so baked that the water was forming puddles on the surface instead of sinking in.

In the distance, the wail of sirens could be heard and Annabeth knew that they didn't have long before they were surrounded by police and maybe even the army. Plus a bunch of scientists that would probably want to dissect them if the Mist hadn't held up against the vastness of the battle.

Kampê swooped down again, taking out all of the skeletons' skulls this time and laughing at what she saw lying in the middle of their protection. Percy turned around and Annabeth saw something snap within her boyfriend; the tears had dried instantly and his eyes frosted over until they were glinting like dull steel. He snatched up his trident, which he had dropped when falling to his knees next to his mother, and raised it to the sky.

Slowly, the air around Percy began to spin. Annabeth could feel it at first but not see it, yet soon enough its pattern was clear. Water began to rise from the ground around Percy; even the rain about him had stopped hitting the floor and was drifting back up into the sky. Her ears popped as the air pressure dropped rapidly. She could feel warm, moist water rushing upwards past her face but at the same time there was a definite cooler breeze being sucked down from the sky above her. She looked up — where the thunderclouds above her had been one solid mass she was sure, if she squinted, that she could see them begin to rotate.

Her eyes widened. The last time this had happened, Percy had formed a mini hurricane when fighting Hyperion and he had never been able to manage it since. It was clearly a move that required insanely strong emotional intensity and he had that in spades right now. Even the ring of relative which they were all in the centre of was bigger than it had been when Percy had defeated Hyperion.

"Percy," she said, surprised to find that she already had to yell to be heard over the clamour he was creating. "PERCY! What are you doing?" Her voice was higher pitched than she had meant it to be, actually bordering on shrill, but she couldn't help it. Already the air was thrumming with energy as Percy forced warm, moist air upwards which in turn sucked cold air down from above and it was scaring her a little.

"Kampê started this," Percy seethed. "Now I am going to end it." A huge updraught blasted Percy high into the air, spinning like a top. The clouds swirled fast and faster around him and became darker and darker. The water vapour he was hoovering up was rising so fast that Annabeth could see its transformation from vapour to cloud — it just kept adding and adding to the charged atmosphere high above them.

Percy touched down in the middle of the Meer and the storm immediately kicked up several notches thanks to the water it began drink thirstily from beneath Percy. What had probably been just a tropical storm was bumped up until it was at least a category two hurricane (Annabeth had studied the Saffir-Simpson scale), judging by the way that the trees around them were creaking and groaning, buffeted heavily by the wind. Twigs and leaves and small branches were whipped from the trees. Wooden debris from Kampê's earlier attack on the small group of trees and the damage done by Tyson's stray hammerhead was lifted from the ground and began to whirl around Percy.

Kampê was forced to duck and weave through the sheer amount of detritus whipping and tumbling and spinning through the air. She shrieked in rage as she tried to get close to Percy but was blown backwards all the time. At one point she managed to penetrate as far as the eye wall, but suddenly the eye was blown wide until it was the diameter of the entire Meer. Kampê screamed in actual terror as the wind from the eye wall tossed her backwards and then straight upwards.

"WHAT IS HE DOING?" Nico yelled to Annabeth over the noise of the storm. He crawled over to her, keeping low as the wind tried to get underneath him.

"Falling to pieces," Annabeth said, her shocked face concentrating solely on her boyfriend and the power at his command. "He did this once before, when he defeated Hyperion but this... This is something else. I don't think he's going to be able to stop. I mean, once a hurricane gets started it's pretty much a perpetual heat engine until it touches land and I don't think Percy is going to be leaving the water any time soon, do you? This is huge, bigger than before, Nico. We've got to slow him down."

"If I could slow down hurricanes I'd be a billionaire working at the National Hurricane Centre," Nico snapped at her. "Weather is not my thing, oddly enough. Not much of that going on below the ground." Almost as if it were on cue, the ground began to open up around the two of them, making Annabeth jump. Skeletal arms had been passing Grover and Paul beneath the earth and were now thrusting them back into the daylight, still unconscious. Nico hoped that by grouping everyone in one place, Percy was less likely to blow them away.

The wailing sirens were drowned out now by the storm, but Annabeth could see police officers making their way in through the same entrance that Rachel had come dashing through to warn them, something that felt like it had taken place months ago. They didn't get far, however — soon they were soaked to the skin and a couple of them were even lifted from their feet and slammed back to the ground. They came no further, rather stopped and stared, pointing and yelling to each other or just looking with their mouths wide in shock.

"We've got to get him off the water," Annabeth said determinedly. "His demigod powers aren't enough to sustain a storm like this on his own. He's feeding from the water."

"Just to get this straight," Nico said, "last time he did this, he defeated a Titan right? Hyperion, the next most powerful Titan after Kronos? And you're saying this is _worse_?"

"Yeah," Annabeth said, with a shrug. "In a nutshell? Sure."

"We're going to die," Nico said, sucking air through his teeth. "Just thought I'd warn you. By the way, that thing I said about my father being pissed at us? Yeah, that still stands. Bad, bad, bad, bad, _bad _time to make a trip to Hades as ghosts."

Annabeth snorted. "Whatever story there is behind that, save it. I don't have time for daddy issues right now. We're not going to die. Why is that your prognosis for everything?" She sighed and rolled her eyes at Nico's single quirked eyebrow. "Okay, point taken. But you can't just keep relying on _dying _when it comes to these things. Positive thinking, yes? Just help me out here for once."

"Okay, okay. So how about we're going to die... but perhaps death by wind won't be too painful a way to do it?"

"If I had time to kick you scrawny little ass I would," Annabeth snapped. "Luckily for you, I'm kind of preoccupied over here what with trying to do the brain work for both of us. We just... I don't know. Hurricanes are borne from rising warm water vapour. What will make him come off the water? If we can just—" She was cut off as Percy shot about a hundred feet straight up like a bottle out of a cork and was lost from sight. "Oh," she said weakly. "Oh."

"Well, he's off the water," Nico said dryly. "Didn't seem to help us out much." He scrambled backwards to avoid Annabeth's stray fist coming in his direction, but the truth of what he said couldn't be denied. Still the vortex of water vapour was coming up from the Meer and although Percy was lost from sight amongst the clouds, Annabeth would bet her scholarships that Percy was standing on top of that column.

Lightning blazed in the sky above them, no longer darting from cloud to cloud but erratically bursting and crackling from the centre of Percy's storm. Even over the storm they could hear Kampê's bellows of pain and shock until in the blink of an eye bolts of lightning blew outwards in from all around the circle and were caught up in the winds. They came to a point and there was an explosion above them that tore a hole in the clouds, revealing Kampê as she was blasted into golden dust. Her scimitars plunged downwards and crashed into the ground, blackening the already-dying grass and corroding it into a black gloop for a very large diameter.

Monster dust rained down around them, mingled with the raindrops that had been allowed to fall again. The clouds above them thinned but the original storm still didn't stop, although at least it was higher overhead and the winds were dying to practically a whisper compared to what they had been before. Percy descended gracefully but didn't return to the ground, instead hovering on a drastically-reduced upwardly-moving cushion of air.

"You killed Kampê," Annabeth said, unable to keep either the fear out of her face or voice. "You... Percy, I don't think a demigod has _ever _been able to do that."

"They didn't try hard enough," Percy said. His face was like stone. He glanced back at Sally's sprawled form and his jaw tightened even further. His hair had been blown in all directions and was sticking up haphazardly all over the place, but when Annabeth moved towards him tentatively, trying to bring him down both literally and emotionally, she realised it wasn't just the wind that was having that effect on his hair. The air around him was pulsing with ozone and there was a level of static electricity coming from his body that meant she could barely be able to stand within six inches of him.

"Percy, you can stop now," Annabeth said. "You killed Kampê. You did it. We won. Please just come down and we can talk— "

"What would you like to talk about, Annabeth?" Percy snapped. Lightning crackled between his fingertips and Annabeth wondered exactly how much of the storm's energy Percy had coursing through him. "Would you like to talk about how my mom just died in my arms and how I'm never going to see her again? Because you can totally relate to that, can't you, what with your dad still sitting safely with tenure at some stupid Californian college."

"Percy!" Annabeth said, gasping in shock and recoiling physically from his words. This was nothing like the guy that she knew and loved; his actions were totally out of character but if she knew anything she knew that grief did funny things to people, and she had seen enough of that in her lifetime. Would Silena Beauregard have come to join the battle in Clarisse's armour if she hadn't had her heart and soul slashed to ribbons by Beckendorf's death? Nico was standing right there, proof of what grief could do to make a person go off the deep end and start trusting evil ghosts and hating anyone who tired to help him. And then there was the way she had felt after losing Luke to the greater good, the way she still felt, sometimes, when thoughts of him crept up on her when her brain was idle. Grief had the power to change people, especially when it was fresh, and the ugliness of Percy's character right now didn't shock her as much as it would have under any other circumstances. Some people lashed out when they grieved — who was she to dictate how other people coped? "I, I... I didn't say that I understood it but—"

"But nothing. You have no idea what I am feeling right now," he said, and for a moment Annabeth saw the expression on his face slacken into one of pure grief. "What it's like to lose someone who has always been there for you, who..." He couldn't finish and he was beginning to sink back to the ground.

"She doesn't," Nico said, getting to his feet himself and shoving his sopping wet hair back from his face. As he got up, he was sure he felt the rain pounding faster and colder and he couldn't conceal a gasp or prevent himself from hunching his shoulder against the storm. "Okay, so she doesn't. But _I_ _do. _Bianca... and then finding out about my mom..." He swallowed, forcing himself to repress the feelings that had been dug up as he had watched Sally die. "Talk to us. Okay? Come down and talk to us."

"I should have done something. I should have been defending her, I never should have let Kampê get close. I never should have even let her come here today..." Percy began, shaking his head and coming within inches of the ground.

Annabeth stepped towards him hopefully, trying for a hug, but the electricity surrounding him was still too much to bear and she was forced backwards. "There's nothing more you could have done," she said. "Don't let thoughts like that tear you apart."

"I did know," Percy said hollowly. "This was destined to happen and I did nothing. I let her come here; _I let this happen, _Annabeth."

"Come on, Percy," Nico said, sweeping a hand towards Rachel. "Judging by her ridiculously manic entrance, I don't think even she saw it happening until it was too late to stop it. What are you compared to an Oracle who's been at this fortune-telling business for a couple of millennia?"

Somehow, instead of soothing Percy, this made things worse and his descent halted. "You don't get it. Letting her even be here today was all my fault. I should have told her, warned her, protected her."

"How?" Annabeth said exasperatedly, ignoring the pricks at her skin the voltage around Percy was giving her in order to get closer to him. "Don't beat yourself up, _please_ Percy. It's going to destroy you."

"Destruction can't be worse than this," Percy said, the solid mask sliding back onto his face. "You know what? I'm going to fix this. I can make this better. I can do it. I _can_."

As he began to rise back into the air, a particularly loud rumble of thunder, even louder than the ones they had heard before if that was possible, growled. It was different than the natural thunderclaps they had heard: this one seemed more like a warning.

"Percy, come down," Annabeth said, connecting the dots in her head and genuinely frightened. She looked between the sky and Percy, who had lightning snaking around his entire hands now and what she was sure were sparks flickering at the corners of his eyes. "You know you're not supposed to be in the air. You know Zeus hates that. And lightning, Percy... come on. Zeus is not going to let you get away with lightning."

"Hurricanes come from the sea," Percy called down at her. "This is a power that belongs to me."

"_And the air!"_ Annabeth yelled as the winds began to pick up again. "You are edging into Zeus's domain, Percy! STOP! He'll kill you!"

"I'd like to see him try," Percy said with grit in his voice.

"STOP BEING AN IDIOT AND GET BACK HERE FOR THE LOVE OF OLYMPUS!" Nico shouted in desperation, tearing his throat to pieces with the volume. He knew all too well what happened when mortals or demigods induced Zeus's wrath — he had been at ground zero when Zeus was bent on incinerating people.

It seemed like it was too late, though. Zigzagging down came a bolt of lightning larger and brighter than any they had seen so far. It was aiming straight for Percy and both Annabeth and Nico screamed; Annabeth clapped her hands over her mouth and struggled to stay upright as her already-bad knees tried to buckle underneath her in fear and shock.

"PERCY!"

Annabeth wasn't even sure if it was her or Nico or both of them that had let loose the yell; they were both staring upwards, waiting for the worst, waiting for Zeus to strike Percy dead.

Percy thrust his trident into the air and pierced the lightning bolt. A dome of pure energy formed over the three prongs of the trident, swelling and swelling until it was so huge and bright that Annabeth and Nico couldn't bear to look at it any more.

With a strained growl of exertion Percy wrenched his trident backwards with both hands and the dome exploded. Forks of lightning shot in all directions, some from the explosion and some from Percy's body. The temperature shot up around Annabeth and Nico and suddenly they were gusted upwards into the air by a strong wind that caught Paul, Grover and Sally caught in it as well. Beneath them, the ground pretty much exploded. It was as if a minefield containing a thousand mines had detonated simultaneously; massive chunks of the earth were blown up into the air and were vaporised; the lightning burst through the wet ground wherever it hit — they could see it travelling underground, singeing the grass on top, chucking more chunks of dirt and grass into the air.

Large craters were created by the lightning and a entire section of the concrete path was thrown sixty feet in the air and turned to dust as if it was nothing. The surface of the Meer began to boil and seethe; trees were split right down the middle and burst into flames; the Dana Discovery centre was blasted into a mushrooming cloud of flaming debris; street lamps and traffic lights outside of the Park began to blow, shattering in a blaze of sparks and shards of glass. Fifth Avenue was filled with a cacophony of screaming and shattering glass as windows were blasted both outwards and inwards, raining shards of glass onto the pavement and street. They were protected form the electricity and the maelstrom of fragments inside their bubble of air but below them the entire north-east corner of Central Park was being destroyed.

Then it stopped.

They were all let down with a bump and looked up to see Percy still hovering in midair. His clothes were blackened, charred and holey and he was breathing heavily. Even from down on the ground Annabeth could see that his hands were blistered and raw and bleeding where he had been gripping the trident despite his invulnerability.

There were no words to be said so Annabeth and Nico just gawped from their position in a large, smouldering crater. When the ringing in their ears died enough, they could hear car and burglar alarms going off all along Fifth Avenue accompanied by the squeal of tyres and the crunch and crashing of steel-on-steel as the Fifth Avenue traffic presumably careened out of control. There were several fires belching smoke, both along the street and across their part of the Park, making it was difficult for them to breathe. Apparently, the lightning had somehow even managed to short out the storm front that had been above them and August sunshine once again reigned, making the carnage all the more clear.

"He's too far gone," Annabeth mumbled in horror. "I don't know how much of that person up there is Percy anymore. We've got to stop him."

"_How_?" Nico demanded. "Once again: _how? _What do you want to accomplish that Zeus couldn't?"

"Look after my mom," Percy told them. "She's going to be okay. She's going to be back soon." His voice was eerily calm and with that, he spun away southwards on the wind.

"Where is he going?" Annabeth said, twisting around to watch his blurred form disappear.

Nico squinted in Percy's direction and then his already-pale complexion drained entirely of colour, greying before Annabeth's eyes. "Oh no," he murmured. "Oh, by Olympus please gods no."

"What?" Annabeth snapped, grabbing his arm and wrenching him around to face her. "'Oh no'? Why 'oh no'?"

Nico didn't say anything just vanished into a particularly large shadow caused by a jutting piece of crater, dragging Annabeth with him through the darkness. When they emerged she was cursing at him in protest, but it didn't last long. They were at the other end of Central Park now, just north of The Pond. Percy was floating above a particularly large cluster of boulders, eyeing them determinedly.

"Don't do this!" Nico yelled, starting forwards and leaving Annabeth trailing. "Percy, please. Think about this. Think about how this ended for Orpheus. He didn't succeed! It made everything _worse._"

"Orpheus wasn't me," Percy said calmly, turning his neck so he was looking at Nico. "I'm going to bring her back."

With that he began to spin once more, drawing a waterspout from The Pond and cocooning himself in it. From within, lighting flared as the mouth of the spout tore into the boulders, tossing them into the air as if they were Styrofoam movie props.

"What's going on?" Annabeth demanded. "What is he doing?"

"He's cracking open the back entrance to Hades," Nico said, his voice tiny with awe, not fully believing what he was seeing. "Without music. Just to, you know, adding to the list of things a demigod has never been able to do."

"He's _what?_" Annabeth yelped. "That's _impossible_."

"You mean like killing Kampê?" Nico asked pointedly, causing Annabeth to purse her lips.

"This is _different_," she said, although she didn't know how. "There is no way—"

Lightning exploded. Boulders were tossed to the side and caused mini tsunamis as they hit The Pond, sloshing water up on the shores. Annabeth and Nico were caught knee-deep in the deluge; Annabeth was knocked off her feet thanks to her knee and dragged back across the ground as the waters receded.

When Nico saw the tunnel leading down into the earth he went cold, and it was nothing to do with being shirtless and drenched through. A large part of him had secretly believed Annabeth — he had been pretty much certain that there was nothing that could open that door. Nothing until now, anyway. Percy alighted on the top of the steps and looked back at them for once last time before beginning his descent. Nico slipped sideways into the shadows and attempted to come out next to Percy but was rebuffed as the earth trembled and began to close, sealing the entrance once more and locking Percy under the ground on his quest to raise his mother from the dead.


	6. Chapter 6

**This is filler, filler night... Really though, this chapter contains a lot of things that had to be said to get them out of the way so I could continue with the story. It's a transition chapter, so sorry for the lack of action within.**

**Thank you so much for all of your reviews and favourites thus far. They really, really mean the world to me. I'm just always so grateful that someone has bothered to comment on stuff that I've done or add it to the favourites. **

Nico got back to his feet slowly, wincing at the pain in his coccyx and butt caused by his repulsion from the Underworld. He had never been rejected from his father's domain before, so as well as physical pain he was smarting mentally as well. What did Percy have that he didn't which allowed him such free access to the Underworld when he, child of Hades, did not? Then again, he didn't have the power that Percy had running through him right now. If Zeus wanted to blast Nico to ashes, Nico knew that he would probably be inside a Dustbuster this very second. How Percy had survived that, he had no idea.

Annabeth was dragging herself out of the muddy deposits that had been left by the tidal waves, clawing at grass so sodden it looked like hair that had been over brylcreemed down towards the shores of the pond. She spat out mud and water indignantly, using a filthy hand to cuff at her filthier face. When she had made it to flatter ground, she didn't have the energy to stand up and just slumped over, landing on her back and staring up at the sky.

"We lost him, didn't we?" she said dejectedly, refusing to look anywhere else but at the radiant blue arcing above her.

"He's only in the Underworld," Nico reassured her. "We can find him again."

Annabeth was shaking her head wearily though. "No, Nico. Not lost like that. He's lost him to whatever power he has inside him right now."

"Bullshit," Nico said, a little more forcefully than he had meant to. "This is Percy. The most down-to-earth person we know. The only place he's lost right now is in Hades and we'll get him back. Or we will if you'd just stop lying there having a little sunbathing/mud pack combo treatment."

Annabeth dropped the matter, but she didn't stop shaking her head right away. When she sat up, she glanced over to the landslide that had re-sealed the entrance to Hades and couldn't help but give a pained sigh. "We've got to get back to the others," she said tiredly. "We've got to deal with everything before the cops decide it's safe to enter the Park again."

"What about Percy?" Nico asked, frowning.

"First things first," Annabeth said briskly. "We've got to prioritise. Everyone back there is in the cops' way which is not good. We've got to get them out before we can do anything else. Besides, seeing what we just did, don't you think Percy can handle himself for now?"

Nico wrinkled his nose at her words but didn't let her see. You didn't get in the way of a child of Athena when they were drawing up plans, and that went doubly for Annabeth. "Do you want some help with your knee first?" Nico asked, pulling a small plastic bag with some slightly-squashed squares of ambrosia out of his pocket and shoving a couple in his mouth, feeling the flesh around his shoulder wound tighten as it began the healing process.

Annabeth grimaced. "No. I'll do it. Just be ready with some ambrosia straight afterwards." As she psyched herself up to do it, taking deep breaths and staring at the almost obscenely-shaped state her knee was in, she selected a twig from next to her on the ground. Slipping it between her teeth she bit down hard, placed both hands on her knee and gave a wrenching jerk. Her scream of pain was muffled by the twig and she was blinded by tears.

For a moment she lived in a world of agony where nothing else even existed before eventually the pain dialled it down a couple of notches and she could open her eyes and spit out the twig. She held her hand out to Nico and he immediately placed two squares of ambrosia into her palm; she popped them into her mouth like they were aspirin and chewed so fast Nico was sure that she must have broken some kind of record. Even after she swallowed she was still breathing hard and beads of sweat were popping up all over her face.

"Can you stand?" Nico asked, not waiting for an answer but grabbing her arm and dragging her up anyway. He groaned as he took her full weight. "Gods, you're heavy."

"Wow, Nico. You really know how to talk to women. You must be beating them off with a stick," Annabeth said, unable to keep the slightly sarcastic sneer out of her voice.

"Bite me," Nico shot back, not giving her any time to reply as he selected a shadow deep enough and disappeared on the journey back to the other side of the Park.

When they reappeared, they both felt their hearts sink. Crouching on his haunches and frantically checking for a pulse in Sally's neck was Paul, his trembling hands trying to find any place on her carotid artery where a beat could be found. Rachel was sitting up, one arm wrapped around her knees. She was using the other one to massage the groove under her brow bone with her thumb, obviously trying to deal with a major headache. Then Annabeth realised that the hand was also being used to hide tears.

Paul looked around desperately, his eyes roving the destruction around him. When his eyes fell on Annabeth and Nico standing in what used to be empty space he jumped. "What happened?" he demanded, rounding on them and scrabbling to his feet.

"Monsters," Annabeth said in a small voice, pity written across her entire face. "I'm so sorry, Paul," she said, shaking her head and blinking back yet more tears. "There wasn't anything we could do. She got bitten and—"

"No," Paul bit out, shaking his head much more violently than Annabeth had done, denying her words. "No. Don't say that. Did you call 911? We can get her to a hospital and they can do something, there's got to be something we can do, I mean..." He had no suggestions though and his voice died as he looked back at Sally. "Something. _Anything._" He was pleading with them now out of pure desperation.

"She's gone," Annabeth said. "I'm really sorry."

Paul looked crushed and something in his eyes was extinguished at Annabeth's words. He exhaled sharply and then again and again, until eventually his body was racked with sobs. He sat down abruptly on the grass next to Sally and gently hooked a strand of hair out of her face.

Annabeth bit her lip but she couldn't delay what she had to say any longer. "Look, we've got to go. I don't even know how many cops are out on the street but I'd imagine they'd send the entire freaking NYPD out for this. They're not going to stay back forever. They might even think this was a bomb or something and then I don't even know how it spirals out of control from there. Terrorist squads and gods know what else. We've got to get out of here."

"I'm not leaving her," Paul said fiercely. "I'm not leaving her in the middle of this. They'll take her away..."

Annabeth raked a hand through her hair distractedly, feeling it tug and snag as she hit the clumps of mud gluing it together. "We can take her with us, Paul but you're going to have to tell someone sooner or later. The... the authorities have to know."

"Well... technically not if Percy succeeds," Nico said, recoiling in surprise as Annabeth glared at him. When she turned to face him, her lips were a thin, angry line. "What?" he asked defensively.

"Nico, don't go there. That is a possibility so remote and something that is ridiculously unhelpful to bring up right now," Annabeth hissed at him, but her voice wasn't low enough to keep it out of Paul's hearing.

"What possibility?" he asked, the light in his face spitting out a small spark of hope. "What possibility?" he repeated, standing up again. "What aren't you telling me? Where has Percy gone, what is he doing?"

Annabeth said nothing when Paul turned to her, only avoided his eyes and folded her arms, sticking her tongue into her cheek mostly to lock it in position so she couldn't use it to berate Nico.

Nico frowned at Annabeth before answering. "He's gone down to Hades," he said. "To, to... try and make a deal. He might bring her back."

Annabeth couldn't hold her tongue any longer. "Stop it Nico," she snapped. "'Might bring her back'? Might?_ Might? _It's _never been done. _It's absolutely useless to spread false hope like that! I thought you of all people would get that."

"So you _don't _want her to be alive again?" Nico said, raising his voice now too. "What is wrong with you?"

"Of course I want her back!" Annabeth exploded. "What kind of person would I be if I didn't? But let me repeat something: no one had ever, _ever _managed to pull someone out of Hades, Nico. It can't be done and it's not healthy to latch onto something like that as a way to stop grief!"

"How do you know it hasn't been done?" Nico demanded. "What, have you read the chronicles of every single person who's tried it?"

"I can't believe you," Annabeth shot back. "Seriously, Nico, what has gotten into you? You _know _your dad! Better than anyone. You know the rules, how it works down there... Why are you arguing with me? And to answer your question no, I have not read the life stories of everyone who has tried to retrieve a loved one but I don't need to. If they'd succeeded it would be freaking headline news and splashed across every historical document ever. Don't you think we'd know if there'd been any successes? The closest was Orpheus and when he failed it sent him halfway around the bend and he got torn apart and tossed into a river. Is that want you want for Percy, for everyone who loved Sally?"

Nico had no comeback for that and stayed silent, staring at the ground. Paul's eyes flicked between them, torn between Annabeth's reasoning and Nico's words of hope. Eventually something dawned on him and he swivelled round to face Rachel.

"Rachel," he said, causing her to give a particularly long sniff and look up at him, dabbing tears from her face in a desperate stab at composure. "Rachel, Percy said something about you being able to see the future or whatever. What do you see? Is it possible?"

Rachel sighed. "It's nearly impossible for me to see into the Underworld," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm Apollo's Oracle; there's nothing that the sun illuminates that I can't see, or the moon because of the whole sun reflecting thing, but there is definitely no sunlight in Hades. I can't penetrate down there."

"We can argue some more later," Annabeth said, her tone final. "But we can't do it here. We _have to go_."

"I've bought you some time," a voice suddenly said, accompanied by the descent of a cool sea mist and breeze all at once that settled over the Park, hissing as it quenched the flames still burning all around them.

The sudden appearance led to Annabeth and Nico drawing their weapons out of sheer habit, but when they turned towards the direction of the voice they saw a man standing there in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, deeply tanned from years of salt spray and sun exposure and with an angler's hat complete with fishing lures on his head. They dropped their weapons, recognising Poseidon in human form.

"I've put a time barrier over the area," he said. "I can't hold it for long; Zeus hates it when any of us do it because it reminds him of our father, but I needed to talk to you."

"Is Percy okay?" Annabeth asked immediately. "What's going on?"

Poseidon heaved a sigh. "Nothing good," he said, letting out a long exhale afterwards. "It's lucky he's in Hades right now. Even Zeus can't touch him there; it's not his domain. It's rare to see my brother this angry. No mortal has ever survived a direct hit from his lightning before. With Percy out of reach, he blamed me." He lifted his hat to reveal a smoking, mostly bald, blackened scalp with tufts of scorched hair clinging haphazardly to the skin beneath.

"Is he going to be okay, though?" Annabeth asked again, concern growing in her voice after Poseidon dodged her question.

"Honestly, Annabeth? I really don't know. He's going through a lot right now and it's unleashing demigod powers not seen for centuries."

He hesitated for a little while, and Annabeth thought she saw a flash of pity cross his face; the look stabbed her in the chest with fear — why was he pitying her?

"He's... changing," Poseidon said eventually, clearly choosing his words carefully.

"Into what?" Annabeth breathed, barely wanting to vocalise the question because she was sure she didn't want to hear the answer.

"Is he going to get my wife back?" Paul demanded suddenly at the same time as Annabeth, mostly drowning Annabeth out.

Poseidon turned to him and blinked at the direct question from a pure human being. "He is going to do everything in his considerable power," Poseidon said. "That much I know. Whether he will succeed or not, and believe me, I really, sincerely hope he does, is something that is beyond me. Hades is as much not my realm as it isn't Zeus's. What will happen down there I cannot say. My brother is... he takes his role very seriously," he said, sneaking a sideways glance at Nico. "He always has done and does so now, even now when the little détente between the three of us has been mostly solved."

"So basically you don't know," Paul snorted dismissively, folding his arms over his chest.

"Careful," Rachel muttered quietly, reaching up and placing a hand on Paul's arm as Poseidon's eyes flashed. "Remember, he may look human but he's not." She used Paul's arm to haul herself to her feet and walked over to Poseidon, squinting slightly up at his face. "They deserve to know," she told Poseidon at length. "Especially Annabeth."

Poseidon shot her a look that was warning, angry and uneasy all at once. "I am going to have to have a word with my nephew, clearly, about the information he sends down to his Oracles. The doings of gods are supposed to be off his list."

Rachel said nothing, not dropping her gaze from his and only shrugging at his words. As he said, she got this stuff from Apollo firsthand — all she did was repeat it. She turned towards Annabeth at the same time Poseidon did, trying to shield herself from what was about to be said by wrapping her arms around her torso and not looking at the blonde.

Annabeth saw Rachel's front teeth catch her bottom lip and her heart sank. She had known that she wouldn't like what was coming next, and the Oracle's expression confirmed that. Once again she ran a hand through her tangled hair and took a deep breath, attempting to psych herself up for what was to come. "Okay," she said in an exhale. "Hit me. How much worse can the news get, anyway?" she said shakily, attempting a hollow laugh. No one else laughed, just looked all the more sombre and she closed her eyes. So much for hiding behind a shred of denial and the belief that this was the worst things could get.

"As demigods get older, I'm sure you realise that you become more powerful," Poseidon began. "It's a sad fact that it's not easy to survive to twenty-one if you're a half-blood—"

"Told you," Nico blurted, gloating at a totally inappropriate time before he could stop himself. Annabeth's glare extracted a shrug from him and shamed him to silence so Poseidon could continue.

"—but when they do, they reach the pinnacle of their powers. That happened to Percy today, and the death of, of Sa— his mother..." Poseidon stumbled over the words, not able to stop a glance as Sally's body as he did so. "Well, that magnified it. Then when I gave him the trident..." He broke off, shaking his head. "I wish I never had. I knew that he would have to be twenty-one before he was able to wield such a weapon, but I did not foresee something like this happening on the day he received it. It just exacerbated the situation."

"Why does that mean he's changing?" Annabeth pressed.

"Percy is my son. A child of the 'Big Three' as you mortals like to call my brothers and me. His powers already far exceed those of other children of gods and goddesses, remember that. Other than Thalia Grace, there is probably not a more powerful demigod on the planet, and it must be remembered that her powers are weakened by the fact that she will never become twenty-one and because she has pledged herself to Artemis." He turned to Nico, apparently having sensed his scowl without seeing it. "Perhaps, given time, you might rival Percy's powers, of course," he said. "But right now you cannot hold a candle to Percy and I think you know that."

Nico couldn't stop a jealous pout shoving out his bottom lip. "Yeah, fine. Whatever," he muttered, glaring at the fried ground beneath his feet.

Poseidon hesitated again before speaking; clearly, he was entering the most difficult part of the explanation. "When he was sixteen and we gave him the choice to become immortal, just because Percy turned it down... it didn't mean that the offer went away. I am aware that he chose something else instead but immortality as a god is not something we on Olympus just dole out to anyone, as I'm sure you know. Once such an offer has been made, there is no way to revoke it fully, so it's always been on the table. Since Percy's sixteenth birthday, the option has always been there and it always will be."

"What are you saying?" Annabeth said quietly; her brain had already arrived at the destination but still she desired to hear it said aloud in concrete terms, just in case she was wrong.

Poseidon sighed heavily. "What Percy did today... you were right, Annabeth, when you said that no demigod has ever been able to defeat Kampê. You were also right when you said that no mortal has ever survived a direct hit from Zeus. To do both of those things, he had to embrace his godly side almost entirely, which was only possible through what can only be described as a fluke combination of factors: the trident, his twenty-first birthday, his mother's death..."

"Demigods can't do that," Annabeth said, shaking her head. "That's... it can't be done." Then, "Can it?"

Poseidon again shot her a look of sympathy before speaking. "It has happened occasionally. Very, very rarely. Heracles, for instance, had his mortal half burned away on a funeral pyre before his ascent to godhood — it was kept out of the legends but for his part in the giant war and for saving Hera from rape at the hands of Porphyrion, even after all of the bad blood between them, we offered him the same thing we did Percy but he, too, turned it down.

"I'm sure you know how the rest of the tale goes, Annabeth: some time later, he put on the tunic imbued with the curse of the centaur Nessus, who had tricked his wife Deianira into believing that his blood was a love potion. Hercales's wife's betrayal, combined with the guilt he felt for killing the innocent Lichas just for bringing him the tunic and the intense pain caused by the curse led to him embracing his godly side.

"The tunic burned his flesh, exposing the bone — no mortal could have lived through that but he wanted to go out on his own terms, on the pyre, and to do so he had to tap into all of his godly strength. His mortal side went to Hades, where it existed as a fraction of what it had been in life, because it had been so badly damaged by the godly power he had used. The rest of him was, as you know, immortalised."

"So, when you say Percy's changing... you mean into a _god_?" Nico asked, his mouth hanging open. "Like... a _god_ god?"

"Oh, the depths of your perception," Annabeth snapped, although out of fear this time not anger.

"I'm sorry, Annabeth, but what Percy did left his mortal side in absolute tatters. It's so badly damaged by the power he used, by the lightning bolt he took, that I'm not even sure there's any redeemable part left," Poseidon said. "As much as I hate to say it, there doesn't seem to be a way back from this for him."

Annabeth couldn't speak; Nico saw her face and body subside inwards all at once. She gave a half-nod, staring past Poseidon in a glassy way, almost as if she wasn't really taking it all in. Nico's arm shot out in a convulsive motion and squeezed Annabeth's arm, the comforting gesture quite alien to him. A boom of thunder broke the stunned silence, and Poseidon looked up uneasily, crouching down involuntarily as if he were afraid he was going to get zapped again.

"I've got to go," Poseidon said. "Zeus seems to think I'm pushing my luck. Annabeth... I'm so sorry. This is not what I wanted for Percy. I never would have imagined..." Another rumble of thunder sounded, this one lasting longer, its dying peals sounding like a low angry growl. "I'll be watching," he continued, speaking quickly. "I'll try to be as much help as I can." He waved his hand and Sally's body dissolved into a spray of salt water. "I'll keep her safe," he said to Paul, looking him directly in his eyes. "I promise I'll keep her safe, just in case... just in case Percy manages to bring her back. Good luck, with everything," he said, turning on his heel and vanishing.

As soon as he had disappeared, the noises of the city penetrated the Park again, dominated by the wail of sirens. Everyone jumped at the sudden invasion of sound, and Annabeth's head whipped around in the cacophony's direction.

"We have to go," she said again, finding her voice at least.

Nico noticed the change in her face, the way it was set in the determination he was used to seeing from her, the way her eyes were sparkling maniacally as he her brain worked overtime in that way they did when she was forming some kind of plan. "Okay," he said. "That I can manage." There were plenty of craters around with shadows deep enough to disappear into, but as he reached out to grab everyone he noticed someone was missing. "Where's Grover?" he asked.

"Juniper came back for him," Rachel said. "I think he was hurt pretty bad, but she said she could fix him up once she was back in the forest at Camp."

"Okay then," Nico said, walking over to a particularly deep crater and gesturing for everyone to link hands in a long chain. He looked down at the shadow he was aiming for, took a deep breath and jumped feet first into the hole, dragging the rest of the chain with him into the depths of darkness just as some scary-looking guys with machine guns made their first appearance.


	7. Chapter 7

**I forgot to say in the last chapter that I started this fic before I'd read **_**The Lost Hero **_**so I guess this is technically an AU where none of those events ever happened. When I mentioned Hercules and the giant war in the last chapter, I obviously meant the first one not the one that's taking place in **_**The Heroes of Olympus **_**universe right now. I tried to pre-order **_**The Son of Neptune **_**from Amazon today and they laughed at me. Apparently, I am very silly for trying to pre-order a book that isn't out for about ten months…**

**Anyway, I want to say thank you for all of the reviews and favourites and stuff for this fic so far. I hope I've replied to everyone who reviewed personally by now, and if not I'm sorry. I'd make a terrible secretary and I'll try to get you next time around. I looked at the hits for this story and there's more than 1,500. I just… wow. That's all kinds of ridiculous. Once again, THANK YOU.**

**PS: Sorry for the double upload. I messed up the formatting the first time around.**

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When they reappeared in Percy and Annabeth's apartment, the group split apart almost immediately. Annabeth was the first to disengage herself, shaking off Rachel's hand almost violently and trailing her way into the darkened bedroom almost as if she were in a trance. She closed the door firmly behind her. Paul was next, sitting down very hard on the couch and staring at his hands or his knees or the carpet or all three at once without really seeing them.

Rachel had her lip trapped between her teeth again and was looking to Nico for instructions pretty much without even realising she was doing it. As the Oracle, although she saw the future and gave prophecies, she didn't have much agency of her own in this world. Demigods came to her, or Chiron came to her, and their requests brought out the part of her that belonged here, in this world, where gigantic monsters could leave someone without their mother on their birthday. If she didn't have the link through the Oracle inside her or through demigods, then who was she other than Rachel Elizabeth Dare, reluctant socialite and millionairess in her own right? It had never occurred to her before, but she needed someone else who was part of this world to function within it; she was defined only by them. It was a depressing thought that without instruction she just wasn't able to be participate in the half-bloods' world, and Nico was the one option left in the room to provide that service.

Nico wasn't paying any attention, however. He was poking at his semi-healed shoulder and trying and failing to work it round in a circle without feeling pain. Though the skin had started the healing process, it was still oozing a little blood and covered by congealing brown clots. It was also red and raw-looking so, grimacing, he made his way to the bottom drawer in the kitchen (automatically giving it the quick double-tap with his foot that was required to get the stupid thing open) without looking away from his shoulder.

Bending down he began to rummage, shoving whetstones and gun oil for sword maintenance to one side along with countless lone batteries with varying degrees of charge, tangled twine and a pot full of keys that had come with the apartment but didn't fit any of the locks. Finally he retrieved a sizeable first aid kit from the depths of the junk drawer, one of several dotted around the apartment, and after unzipping it he shook the entire contents out onto the kitchen counter in one jerk. Selecting gauze he reached under the sink for the hydrogen peroxide, upended the bottle onto the gauze and pressed it to his shoulder wound, which hurt more than getting the freaking injury in the first place. He'd try more ambrosia later but not right now. He already felt a little warm.

For Rachel, the silence stretched to what seemed like infinity in the apartment, punctuated only by her own breathing, which she could hear echoing ridiculously loudly inside her head. The muted roar of the traffic storeys below them rumbled away in the background; the fridge gave a high-pitched whine as the motor kicked in, sounding exhausted at being expected to keep up with the heat. Still no one spoke and the silence ached to be filled, but Rachel had no idea what to say. Paul continued to stare at the floor and Nico was preoccupied with his shoulder. She didn't care how terrible a person she was for thinking it, but she almost wished that one of them was crying, just so the apartment wouldn't sound like the inside of a mausoleum. Eventually, she finally caught Nico's eye through the wince he was sporting. "What are we going to do?" she asked in a small voice, leaning against the windowsill behind her.

Nico only shrugged with his good shoulder and tore open another packet 0f gauze with his teeth, dumping the first, hydrogen peroxide- and blood-stained piece in the sink. He tried holding the new piece on his shoulder with his cheek so his hands were free to unwind an ace bandage but it slipped and he cursed. "Fuck," he hissed, dropping the bandage and watching it unroll across the scuffed linoleum.

Thankful for the single word from someone else, even if it was a swear, Rachel found her real voice again now that speaking seemed less of a taboo. "Oh, for the gods' sake!" she snapped, marching over to him, bending and snatching the bandage up from the floor without breaking her stride. A few yoga lessons with her mother's instructor had really helped her flexibility. She jammed her fingers down harder on the pad of gauze that she had meant to, causing Nico to yelp, but she was so fed up of watching his pathetic attempt at first aid that she didn't apologise. In the end, she had managed to patch him up quite effectively, she thought, even if she had had to give the bandage an extra hard jerk every time he muttered under his breath.

"Thanks," Nico said when she was finished. "I'd shake your hand but I'm not sure when I'll get the feeling back in my fingers."

"Oh come on. Don't be such a baby. If it wasn't tight it would fall off," Rachel said, tucking her hands into her hips before catching her reflection on the toaster and quickly dropping the pose. Apparently, she looked scarily like her mother when she did that. "Now, seriously. Start talking, di Angelo. How do we fix this?" she asked, fighting the urge to put her hands on her hips again and shoving them in her pockets instead. She was pretty sure her mother's pockets had never had a hand in them, so she was pretty safe with this stance.

"I go and get Percy back," Nico said, with yet another one-shouldered shrug that infuriated Rachel. "Don't tell anyone, but I'm kind of an expert on the Underworld."

"So you're just going to waltz up to him and be all, 'Hey, Percy, you can stop turning into a god now'?" Rachel asked, quirking an eyebrow at him. "Okay, yeah, he'll be real perceptive to that. Go for that one. Let's hope he doesn't summon up another Katrina and blow your ass into Tartarus."

"Okay, fine, I didn't say the plan was totally without possible pitfalls," Nico said, scowling at her. "But I'll just improvise."

Rachel scoffed. "Improvise as you're getting tossed around like a ragdoll by a 150mph winds and zapped by lightning. Uh-huh, okay."

Nico was grinding his teeth. "Fine! I'll… take Annabeth if I have to. She can come up with the plans." He turned to walk towards the bedroom but Rachel grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him round before he could even take a step.

"Don't, Nico. She needs time," Rachel said. "That was a pretty big bombshell that just got dropped on her, you know? The whole she might lose Percy forever thing? Have you been paying any attention?"

"Yeah I have, and you know what? We've just got tons of time to be concerned with her _feelings_. It's not like Percy is destroying half of himself with every minute we're wasting," Nico scoffed, brushing her hand off his shoulder. Before she could catch him again he'd practically leapt towards the bedroom door. "Annabeth?" he called through the wood, knocking with a single knuckle. "Annabeth, I'm coming in." He tried the knob but the door was locked.

"See?" Rachel said smugly. "She wants to be alone."

"Yeah, that doesn't really work for me," Nico said, waving at her as his body was drawn into the shadow under the door and he disappeared.

The bedroom was still as dark as it had been earlier and it took a little while for even his eyes to adjust. When his pupils had finally sorted themselves out to see through the gloom, he saw Annabeth sitting at the dressing table-cum-desk-cum-bookshelf, which Percy had sanded a corner off so they could fit it in the room and still get the closet door open. She was sitting up ramrod straight and staring at herself in the mirror; Nico could see the reflection and she wasn't crying anymore.

"Annabeth?" he tried, wondering if maybe Rachel had been right about giving her some time. He shoved his hands in his pockets awkwardly when she didn't reply. Taking another step into the room he saw that she was playing with the white strand of hair that was the result of holding up the sky.

Annabeth had never dyed it out and now she was winding it round and round her finger before letting it spring back and starting the process over again. It was getting curlier and curlier every time that she did it. Knowing that Percy had practically the same streak in his own hair comforted her somehow, almost as if they were still linked in some way despite it all.

"Annabeth," Nico repeated, more forcefully this time. "If we're going to get to Percy we've got to go now."

"Is there any point?" Annabeth said morosely, still staring at her reflection. "Even if we find him he's still going to be changing and leaving."

"Oh, come on. How do you know until you've tried?" Nico said crossly. "Poseidon said that there was still a little bit of humanity left in him. Maybe we can coax it out or something. Or, of course, we could just sit here in a darkened room and have a self-pity party. That is, if the real Annabeth Chase has been replaced by some weird alien that can't do anything but feel sorry for itself."

"I wasn't strong enough, Nico," she said, finally dropping her gaze from her reflection and bowing her head, looking at her fingers which were busy intertwining themselves in her lap. She heaved a massive sigh and her shoulders slumped.

"For what?" Nico asked, vanishing and appearing again right in front of her between her and her reflection, sitting Indian style with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin resting on his two fists. "Seriously, for what? You're like one of the strongest people I know."

This elicited a small smile from Annabeth. "Compliments? From you, this early in the day? Are you drunk?" Nico didn't move, just kept staring at the top of her head and she sighed. "I wasn't strong enough to ground him," she said eventually, looking up at Nico. "What am I to him if I couldn't even anchor him to this world?"

"And we're back to the pity party. Excellent. I love a good vicious emotional cycle. What's wrong with you? Where's Battle Plan Barbie?"

"Oh, you did _not _just call me Battle Plan _Barbie_," Annabeth said warningly, a trace of her old self returning. "Do you have a death wish?"

Nico grinned and shrugged. "Well, it was either that or slap you. I wanted to try the non-violent approach first."

"Slap me…?" Annabeth echoed in a slightly confused voice. Her eyebrows shot up towards her hairline incredulously, daring him to even try.

"I don't know," Nico admitted, shifting slightly on the desk. "It just seems to be what people do in the movies and on TV if they want someone to snap out of it."

"Yeah, I think that's if the other person is hysterical, Nico," Annabeth scoffed, rolling her eyes at him.

"Oh." Nico paused, considering. "Well, do you want to get hysterical?" he asked. "Because really, I just want an excuse to slap you."

"Try it and you'll draw your hand back as a bloody stump," Annabeth told him. "I'll rip your arm out at the shoulder and beat you with it."

"Ah, Battle Plan Barbie complete with kung fu death grip," Nico said. "Limited edition, new on the market." He vanished when Annabeth lunged at him, reappearing on the bed. "Are you going to stop moping and help me find Percy now?" he asked. "You know that you're the only one who can work this out, right? Percy needs us. Well, I suppose technically you… but you know. Mostly us.

Annabeth sighed, but she couldn't stop her mouth quirking up at the edges. "Fine. Okay, we can do this…" she said, convincing herself rather than Nico by saying it out loud. Nico smiled to himself when he noticed the old plan-concocting look come into Annabeth's eyes. She looked up at him and said, "Only if you promise not to be annoying."

"Can't," Nico said. "Sorry."

"Thought so. Okay, how about you just put a shirt on?" Annabeth asked instead. "Looking at you half naked is really making me consider lesbianism."

Nico looked down at his naked torso, realising for the first time that he had left his shredded shirt in the park. "Oh right. Yeah, I forgot about that. I think I can manage a shirt."

Annabeth narrowed her eyes at the smile plastered across Nico's face then got to her feet and walked over to the door, unlocking it with a twist of the handle and stepping out. Nico climbed off the bed and followed her. In the living room, Rachel was placing a mug of tea in front of Paul, letting her hand rest on his shoulder for an extra moment as a gesture of comfort. Paul murmured his thanks just as Rachel saw Annabeth and Nico emerge from the bedroom.

"Tea?" Nico asked incredulously, wrinkling his nose.

"I don't know," Rachel said defensively. "I don't know, okay? Tea seems to be what people make each other when they're upset. Unless you're my mother and then you make martinis, but I couldn't find any gin."

"There's vodka in the freezer," Nico tried helpfully.

"I'm going to pretend you didn't just suggest vodka martinis to me," Rachel said, turning up her nose. "Martinis are made with gin, end of."

"Yeah, when you say stuff like that, that's how you get that massive flashing neon sign above your head that screams 'SOCIALITE!'" Nico said. "Just so you know as you're apparently so keen to avoid it."

"How are you?" Rachel tentatively asked Annabeth, ignoring Nico. "Is everything… okay?"

"It's going to be," Annabeth said determinedly. Nico tried to hide another smile at the glint growing stronger in Annabeth's eyes. It had been quite fun to irritate that look back into place.

"So you're going after him?" Rachel asked, hope lighting up her face.

"I'm coming," Paul said out of the blue, looking up for the first time since arriving. "If Sally and Percy are down there I'm not staying up here doing nothing."

"You can't," Annabeth told him quietly. "I'm sorry, but mortals can't enter Hades in a corporeal form. There's no way in for you until you die."

"So what, I'm just supposed to sit here twiddling my thumbs while you all risk your lives?" Paul asked, heat rising in his voice.

"We can't take you," Annabeth said again, although this time her voice had a lot more sympathy in it. "I know you want to do something right now, but…" She couldn't finish the sentence, because doing so would imply that he was basically useless, so she just let the last word hang.

"I'll stay with you," Rachel said suddenly. "You don't have to sit here by yourself. Like I said, my boss is the god of the sun. Somehow, I don't think I'll be too welcome in Hades, do you?"

"We'll be fine," Nico said to Paul. "Honestly, I know what I'm doing."

"I hope you do," Paul said darkly. "I really hope you do."

* * *

When Annabeth and Nico (the latter now fully clothed) emerged from the shadows, they were much further away from where Annabeth had expected them to appear. She checked out her immediate surroundings and frowned.

"I thought you were going to take us into your dad's palace? Isn't that where Percy probably is right now?" Annabeth hissed at Nico, nearly losing her balance as he grabbed her by the arm and dragged her down to crouch with him behind a rock. "_Ouch! _What was that for?"

Nico cleared his throat awkwardly. "Uh… Yeah. You know I disappeared before the fight? My dad was sure I was going to get killed so he sort of, uh, tried to lock me in the dungeons until it was over," he said, avoiding Annabeth's eyes. "He sensed that death was about to happen with me in the vicinity and when he found out about Kampê he was worried that I'd be the one to bite it."

"He tried to lock you in the dungeons just because there was a possibility you'd get killed?" Annabeth asked incredulously. "And I thought that my mom could be strict."

"Well… that wasn't his original plan to be fair. It was just when I found out that something seriously bad was going to unfold and he didn't want me there to help, I may have caused a little bit of fuss. Exchanged some choice words with my father, called him a coward, sliced up a couple of his skeletons, beaned him on the head with a really big emerald… I may have also insinuated that you and Percy were more important than his opinions, which _really_ set him off because you know how he's never been Percy's number one fan."

"Ah, okay," Annabeth said, nodding. "I wondered why you kept saying that he was so pissed at _all_ of us. Thanks for dragging us both into that."

"You're welcome," Nico deadpanned. "So, yeah, he's not too happy with me right now. I thought we'd better lay low. I kind of hoped that Percy wouldn't have been able to get past the gates and the lines and he'd still be here, but…"

Annabeth took a quick peek over the rock and saw that the EZ-Death line was in total disarray. The marble arch over the top that proclaimed the line's name had been torn to rubble, pieces of which were strewn all over the place. The bars of the gates were twisted together in places and yanked apart in others as if they were nothing but intertwining vines. The had both been flung open inwards, even though they should have opened outwards, and the impact appeared to have smashed the detectors on either side; one was gone altogether and half of the other one remained, sparking feebly. Security ghouls were trying to make a wall to replace the broken gates, but spirits kept slipping past them. Overhead, the furies wheeled, occasionally plunging down at the spirits who had taken advantage of the destruction and squeezed through, seizing them in their talons before tossing them so far from the gates that Nico and Annabeth couldn't see where they landed. Beyond the gates, Cerberus was gambling around in confusion, the middle head howling in panic, the left head whimpering uncertainly and the right head barking and growling, snapping at any spirit in range.

"Percy's not here," Nico said disappointedly, despite the fact that it was obvious. He had really believed that Percy would still be stuck trying to get through the entrance. "It looks like we've got to go in." He took a deep breath to psych himself up.

Taking hold of Annabeth's hand they vanished again, appearing still crouched behind a particularly large marble planter in Persephone's garden. Percy hadn't made it this far yet, but a strong breeze was wending its way through the garden, setting platinum flowers on bushes and trees tinkling together eerily. Nico looked over his shoulder, back towards the gates of his father's palace, and could see flares of lightning strikes pulsing near the cavern's roof.

"Great, first time we're too late, now we're too early," Annabeth grumbled at him exasperatedly. "Any chance you could play baby bear now and get things just right?"

"You know that a blonde making sarcastic comments about that story automatically opens herself to a whole range of Goldilocks cracks, right?" Nico told her.

"Make just one and you better hope you know how to make your porridge just right because it's all you'll be able to eat after I knock your teeth out."

"Wow, what a charming woman you are. Remind me again: which finishing school was it that you went to?"

Annabeth glared at him; she had known for a very long time that there was very little she could say to shut Nico up but that didn't stop her patience wearing thin sometimes. Percy was generally the buffer between them, but of course he was currently very much indisposed. "Gods you're annoying."

Nico smirked back. "Can I help it if you make it so easy?"

"Look, there's no time for this. I'll murder you later. Can you just do what you do and take us to _Percy_, please?" Annabeth asked. "You know, the whole reason we came down here?"

Nico nodded and took hold of her hand again, but nothing happened. Frowning he tried again, but still the shadows wouldn't obey him and allow him to melt into them. "Uh…"

"Hello, Nico. Back so soon?" a voice asked from behind them, causing Nico to wince and sag all at once.

"Oh hi, dad…" Nico said, elongating the words as he slowly turned to face his father, who was standing there with his arms folded and his eyebrows raised. He hadn't even needed to see that expression on his father's face to know that he was in some pretty serious trouble; he had got that just from the voice. He swallowed hard. "What's… what's up?"

Hades's nostrils flared. "You mean other than the fact that I cleared out an entire cell in the dungeons so it would be nice and empty for my son and now it's going unused?" he said pointedly. "Or how about this massive lump I have on my head caused by an airborne jewel?"

"Well, apart from those things, yeah," Nico said evenly, aiming for innocent although seeing that his dad was seething inside and just waiting for that particular wave of anger to break over him.

"You could have gotten yourself killed, Nico!" Hades shouted, his eyes flaring. "What were you thinking running out on me like that? I was practically going out of my mind thinking I'd next be seeing you as a spirit. And if you _had _to go and fight would it have killed you to let me know that you were okay afterwards?"

Nico blinked. That wasn't the particular wave of anger he had been preparing himself for. This was a concerned parent wave, which had taken him totally by surprise, because he had assumed that his father would be pissed about a whole list of other things first. "Well I didn't, uh, think that I, uh, needed to? Don't you… I mean, you're Lord of the Dead so, well, don't you… kind of know when I'm not… _dead_?" Nico tried cobbling together in a placatory manner, stuttering and stumbling over the words as he did so. He had had something else entirely prepared, imagining that he would be being ripped apart by a totally different tirade right now.

"That's not the point!" Hades snapped, raising his voice. "The point is that you disobeyed me. I specifically told you that you weren't to go. You _humiliated me! _If that had been in front of anyone important I'd be a laughing stock! And what are you doing crouching there in the dirt, anyway? Are you not going to get up?"

Ah, here came the anger Nico had been expecting. He had actually started to feel worried by its absence. "Uh… I'm pretty good," Nico said. "It's you know, nice down here. Earthy."

Annabeth made an impatient noise and wrenched her hand out of Nico's. She got to her feet so she could bow down properly before Hades, cutting in before Nico and Hades could get into a time-wasting domestic dispute. "Lord Hades, I'm sure you know why we're here. Percy—"

"Percy Jackson," Hades spat. "Yes, I know all about him tearing apart my domain, don't you worry. Do you know how much that's going to cost to fix? Do you know how much overtime I'm going to have to pay those ghouls just so they can catch up on the paperwork for all of those spirits that managed to get through the gates without the proper documentation? He's more trouble than he's worth! But no, it's all Saviour of Olympus this and champion of the gods that. Honestly! If I had my way—"

"Percy isn't in his right mind," Annabeth said quickly, straightening up to look the god straight on in the face. "This isn't him; he's just hurting because of—"

"Yes, yes. His mother," Hades said dismissively, waving a hand. "Please don't waste my time by repeating matters of which I am already fully informed. No mortal, daughter of Athena, is _ever _in their right mind when they come down here to see me to try and get someone they love back. That's generally the _point. _They are all crazed by grief. That does not excuse anything."

"If you know that he's coming to ask for her back will you do it?" Annabeth asked as the gentle tinkling of the trees and bushes ramped up to an ugly, discordant jangling, propelled by the growing wind rushing through the garden. It blew hair across her face and she swiped it back in annoyance. She looked towards the advancing flashes of lightning and then back at Hades, not caring if he saw the desperation in her face. If Percy wanted Sally back and Hades wouldn't grant his wish than she hated to think how far Percy would dip into his godly powers to try and get what he wanted, and then she was never going to be able to pull him back from this.

"I do not grant such requests easily," Hades said curtly, almost as if he were reading from a script; he had probably given the same spiel so many times before. "There is much to consider. If every mortal that came down here—"

"He's _not _just any mortal," Nico said suddenly, cutting off whatever protest Annabeth had been about to use and shooting to his feet. "You know that. You just reminded us of everything that he's done for the _world._ Everyone owes him. Even you."

"There's an order to consider, Nico!" Hades said, his tone threatening.

"Oh come on. When was the last time you let someone free from down here?" Nico asked, tilting his chin up defiantly. "How long ago was it that you disturbed that stupid natural order, huh? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A couple of _thousand_? What difference would one _tiny_ blip in the whole thing make in all of that precedent?"

Hades could not keep the triumphant smirk off his face or out of his eyes. "How about nine years ago, give or take a month?" he said coolly, his voice silky as he smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of his robes.

Nico frowned. "What? Who—"

"Sally," Annabeth breathed, putting a hand to her mouth. "Oh, it was Sally…"

"Don't mind me. Just carry on the conversation like I'm not even here," Nico said, throwing his hands up in the air. His eyes flicked between his triumphant father and a crushed-looking Annabeth but neither of them filled him in. "Okay, fine. I'll take the bait. What is going on? What am I missing?"

"She wasn't dead then!" Annabeth burst out with forcefully, snapping out of it and apparently deciding to argue again. Nico could practically see her brain spinning as she delved for the right words. "She hadn't properly died, not like now. That was different. That whole thing was just messed up; none of us even knew what the other was bargaining for when you released her last time. It was all Kronos."

"Kronos didn't make me release her, _little girl_," Hades said contemptuously, a sneer curling his upper lip. "The situation may have been my father's doing, but I released his mother back then as a favour to the boy. It was a token gesture for ironing out the whole complicated mess. How many mortals do you think get that chance once in a lifetime, let alone twice?"

Annabeth glanced over her shoulder at the gathering storm slowly swirling towards the palace, knowing that Percy was at the centre of it gradually shedding his mortality. She turned back to Hades but she was speechless, her mouth working opened and closed. Nico was suddenly afraid that she might start crying again, even though she'd been so strong until now, so calm and collected. Then it occurred to him all of a sudden that she had come down to Hades with only the one plan, which was to meet Percy and try and talk him down. That was why she had been so anxious to find him before. When that hadn't turned out the way she'd wanted it to, she had switched tactics, trying to persuade Hades and reason with him before Percy arrived. Yet now even her second plan, which had been hastily built on slapdash foundations, was now crumbling right in front of her eyes and she had nothing left in her arsenal.

Nico felt a second uncharacteristic surge of sympathy for her in one day and stepped forwards, slipping his hand into hers and hoping Percy was still far enough away to not fry him for doing so. He was surprised when she responded to his touch by squeezing his hand, but she still couldn't speak; she was trying desperately to hold it together in front of his father.

"Are you saying that Percy's mom died _before_?" Nico asked Hades, realising that Annabeth wasn't going to be able to open her mouth without crying.

"Around nine years ago," Hades said in a clipped tone, still wearing that superior smile. "She was strangled by the Minotaur. I prevented her total death, thinking I could use her as a bargaining chip somehow when I realised that Jackson was more than just your average demigod. I knew that he would come to me eventually, one way or the other, and you should never underestimate the power of leverage."

It was Nico's turn to be temporarily speechless as the ramifications of his father's words fell heavily upon him. Hades was saying that Percy had already cashed all of his chips when it came to his mother's spirit and would not be getting such an opportunity again. He could feel Annabeth trembling next to him and even though his mind was churning at about a million miles an hour he couldn't see a way to resolve this situation. His father wasn't the sort that would respond to begging; he would hold them in contempt for even considering it, and even now when he was probably at his most lenient thanks to the reconciliation between him and his family, mercy was still not one of Hades's strong points.

"I'm going to lose him," Annabeth said hollowly.

Nico saw her descend back into that small figure she had been in front of the mirror not an hour before and gritted his teeth. What was up with her today? Why did she keep returning to that point? There was something off about her, something not quite Annabeth. He would never normally have to keep snapping her out of it, getting her back on track like this. He opened his mouth to say something but the earth underneath him gave such a violent judder, lurching towards the palace, that he didn't get anything out. Nico and Annabeth fell over — Hades remained standing but even he stumbled as the earth heaved again.

"Nico!" Annabeth yelped as a silver tree gave a massive groan and began to fall, spilling little platinum flowers like raindrops. Nico grabbed her and vanished into the shadows, reappearing again a few feet away with Annabeth in tow. The tree hit the floor with a gigantic crash — if it had landed on them, it would have killed them both.

"What is the meaning of this?" Hades roared, turning back to his palace where skeleton marines were aiming their M16s over the wall for answers but receiving none.

"I think Percy got to the gates," Nico said weakly, as entire one-ton blocks of stone that had been parapets were shaken free from the top of the outer wall. A crack raced towards the palace and swallowed up three guards; a window behind them shattered. Suddenly, the shaking stopped and an eerie silence took its place, punctuated only by the shivering flowers on the trees and bushes still in motion from the earthquake and the wind. Nico and Annabeth could hear each other breathing in short gasps, adrenaline tensing their muscles for whatever was going to happen next. Then the calm was shattered by an enormous cracking noise that rang out like cannon fire; a huge stalactite had come loose from the roof and plunged downwards, impaling itself at least six feet down into the earth.

"Earthshaker," Hades said mostly to himself, surveying the damage. His forehead creased into a frown. "But…"

"Dad, you… you do know that Percy survived a direct hit from Zeus, right?" Nico asked uncertainly. "And we're not talking like a glancing blow situation here. Zeus hit the bullseye. Percy's kind of juiced up right now."

Surprise etched its way across Hades's face. "No, that's—" The first syllable of the word 'impossible' was formed on his lips, but he swallowed it before he could get it out. "That's highly unlikely," he sniffed instead, unwilling to admit the ultimate power of Zeus's lightning bolts.

"It happened," Nico said dryly. "Now he's on his way here. Do you really want to piss him off?"

"I can handle one demigod," Hades said, drawing himself up to his full height. "My brother obviously wasn't trying hard enough."

Nico opened his mouth to say something to the contrary, but again he was cut off, this time by a horrific noise that made both him and Annabeth clutch at their ears. The sound was the screeching of rending, twisting metal. There was one last huge groan as whatever it was that was being pulled apart gave and then, propelled by a ball of lightning, one of the enormous gates was blown into the garden, crumpled and distorted as if it were no more than an aluminium can. It flattened entire trees as it flew, shearing off metal trunks at the base and tossing their crops of fist-sized precious stones into the air. It hit the ground and skidded, finally coming to rest just short of Hades's palace, having gouged massive trenches out of the barren earth.

Percy floated casually through the archway where the gates had been sealed tight against his intrusion. His arms were held slightly out from his hips and were wreathed all of the way to his shoulders with lightning. Although he appeared to alight gently on the ground, he might as well have been a house falling; his landing sent out a huge shockwave that ripped a gigantic fissure in one of the outside walls. Wind also emanated from the spot where he landed; a sweeping, revolving gust that plucked up spilled diamonds and rubies and sapphires and threw them outwards like shrapnel. Hades had surrounded himself with a dome of black energy and the stones sparked harmlessly off the shield, but Annabeth and Nico had to dive behind the fallen stalactite for protection, listening to the whine of ricocheting jewels and tasting rock dust as their shelter was pulverised.

"Hello, Uncle," Percy said, the lightning around him flickering out, replaced by louder booms and brighter flashes from the churning storm clouds overhead, which had started to look like a boiling pot of extremely thick soup. "I think you know why I'm here."


	8. Chapter 8

**So, I'm back! A little later than the Friday I promised some people… Sorry. I've been a little crazy this week, as in I've been crazy, not the week. Looney Toons alert! Anyway, I hope I've replied to everyone who has reviewed by now. Thank you so much for all of the reviews and favourites — they've truly been awesome.**

**Here it is. Another chapter. With thanks to ****Orochi-Ne****, whose PMs I appreciate and whose boundless creativity in terms of interesting plot bunnies I always enjoy listening to. Also with thanks to Colt, who it's been nice getting to know recently. I recommend checking out their work. I'm thinking there will be two more chapters after this. Possibly two and an epilogue. Not sure yet.**

**Over and out,**

**Mission to Marzipan.**

* * *

"Jackson," Hades said coldly once the wind had died down and he could drop his shield. "Can I ask you to be so kind as to stop destroying my palace? It's rather irritating and most tiresome."

"That depends," Percy said. "Are you going to give me what I need?" There was a tiny tremor to his voice as he asked, but apart from that his face showed no outward sign of what he was feeling.

The 'need' was an unexpected turn of phrase and Hades was taken aback. Normally when mortals came down here they _wanted _their loved ones back; they _demanded_ it of him. Hardly anyone said that they _needed _them back. He was struck by a sudden pang that appeared out of nowhere, one that he wasn't sure he had ever felt before. Was it… sympathy? After Maria was taken from him he had felt the same thing; he had yearned for her back — he, too, had _needed _her back, so he knew how this felt. He gave himself a mental shake. Conjuring up his past with Maria and his old feelings caused him to harden instantly. Despite everything, despite all of his powers, he had not brought her back. That was the way it had to be. So regardless of Percy's phrasing, despite the fact that it severely damaged the aura of arrogance Hades had always assumed surrounded Percy, he reminded himself that Percy had already had his one and only chance. That was all that he would give.

"Percy!" Annabeth yelled, revealing herself from behind the stalactite. "Percy, listen to me, please."

Percy's head whipped around, surprised at her presence. "Annabeth," he said, blinking and losing the biting edge to his voice that he'd had while speaking to Hades. "What are you doing here?"

"Do you really need to ask that?" Annabeth asked him. "I'm here for _you_, Percy. To tell you to stop this and come home with me."

"Not until I've got my mom back," he said fiercely, the gentleness in his voice immediately swallowed up. "Then we can go home."

Nico also made an appearance just then. "Percy," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, but I don't think that that's going to happen."

Percy's face turned ugly in a way that Nico had never seen before. "Why, because Daddy said so?" he sneered, jerking his thumb at Hades.

"You will not address me or my son that way!" Hades shouted. "How dare you bring your insolence down into my realm?"

"Give me my mom back and I won't _be_ in your realm anymore," Percy said. "I'll never bother you again."

Hades scoffed. "You have already had your mother back from me once, Percy Jackson. Are you really asking me to do it again? You say you will never bother me if I return to you your mother's soul, but what happens the next time someone dies? What about your daughter of Athena over there? If she were to die, you'd be back down here in a trice demanding her back also. Where does it end?"

"You don't want to make an enemy of me today," Percy said, giving his full attention back to Hades. "Really."

Hades nostrils flared as he drew himself up to his full height. "I will not change my mind," he said. "My decision is final. Coming down here with all of the threats in the world will do you no good."

"Fine," Percy said, his eyes sparking with what Annabeth fearfully recognised as lightning. "You asked for this."

Hades smirked. "As did you."

With a yell Percy released a bolt of lightning from each hand, illuminating the entire garden with a light brighter than any ever seen in Hades's realm. The air immediately became charged; both Annabeth and Nico's hair rose into peaks of static as the lightning headed towards Hades, who flicked his wrist, sending one bolt careening off course in an erratic pattern until it hit the roof. There was a loud explosion and a huge rumbling sound as gigantic pieces of the roof began crashing down just outside of the palace walls. The other burst of lightning bounced off a small round circle of black energy that appeared in its path and reversed direction, heading back towards Percy, who levitated about eight feet upwards on a column of rising air. There was another huge explosion as the lightning hit the palace wall behind Percy, rending a massive hole near the top which spat debris up and outwards like it was an erupting volcano.

Hades gritted his teeth, forming dark, smoky energy balls in each hand, which were replaced instantly as he threw them rapid-fire at Percy. Percy quickly dropped out of the air to a crouch and felt the wind and power of four or five energy balls shooting over his head. The balls came into contact with a tree just behind Percy, vaporising it. Once again it rained precious stones, ripped from their branches, but this time the glimmering shrapnel was mixed with splashes of molten silver from the trunk, streaks which slashed through the air towards Nico and Annabeth, who were once again forced to take shelter behind the stalactite. Smoking, glowing metal, bubbling malignantly, spattered their shield.

None of the debris seemed to affect either Hades or Percy; it simply disintegrated into nothing whenever it got near. They were both breathing hard now, having tested each other with warning shots and each waiting for the other to make another move. It was Hades whose impatience got the better of him first and he once again started a barrage of dark energy balls in Percy's direction, which Percy began to deflect with gusts of wind, sending them zigzagging wildly in all different directions. A couple hit some of Hades's soldiers that were still guarding the doors and they were blown to dust and tiny bone fragments. Other balls shattered the palace windows in a maelstrom of flying shards. The palace shook with large blasts as the balls hit objects inside and blew them up. The gaping, empty windows were illuminated from within by the flickering of a dark purple and black fire spawned from the explosions.

Still Hades kept firing and eventually Percy had no option but to rise into the air again, the balls coming too fast for him to counter anymore. He began to spin and the centrifugal force flung Hades's energy balls violently outwards like Percy was the centre of an insane, out-of-control Catherine wheel. This time it was Hades's turn to dodge; the ground an almighty lurch and a massive spire of rock with a flat top erupted from beneath the Lord of the Dead, carrying him high into the air. The deflected balls took huge chunks out of the rock he was standing on but he had summoned too big a piece of the earth for them to do any real damage.

The rest of the energy balls Percy had sent spinning out of control managed to wreak some serious destruction, however; the doors which the skeletons had hastily shut against Percy's intrusion were pounded with at least three of them. One door went cartwheeling off into the entrance hall, ripped from its hinges and taking half the doorjamb and enormous chunks of masonry with it. It didn't stop when it hit the internal wall at the opposite end of the hall, instead smashing through the brick as if it were Lego. The other door crashed inwards; the hinges gave a pained, wrenching squeal as the top two were ripped from their moorings, leaving the door hanging at a precarious angle.

Gusts of wind emanating from the revolving Percy took on boomerang shapes, almost becoming solid as they whipped through the air towards Hades, hitting him hard in the chest. The god was lifted off his feet and blasted from his vantage point to smash backwards into the wall to his rear. The wind pinned him there above the ground.

He struggled hard against the force of the wind holding him as Percy stopped spinning and returned to the ground. He advanced on him, grinning maniacally up at the trapped god. As he raised his hand, a glowing ball of lightning building in his palm, Hades managed to make his own hand into a fist. Percy let loose his prepared bolt of lightning at Hades at the same time as skeleton soldiers immediately came running out of the ruined doors at Hades command, weapons in their hands. Just as the lightning left Percy's hand, a skeleton slashed at his face with a sabre, knocking him backwards and sending the lightning wide, annihilating a platinum pergola with vines growing rubies climbing up it.

Lightning still sizzled at Percy's fingertips; he began creating tennis-ball sized spheres of it and throwing them at the skeletons surrounding him, scattering charred, smoking bones all over the courtyard. Hades was released and floated gently back to the ground as the skeletons took up more of Percy's time — they were always advancing on him from all angles, crowding round him in a circle, each one stabbing and slashing and even shooting at him. He had to concentrate entirely on them; no matter how many he blew to pieces more kept coming. He gave an angry yell and a circular burst of wind blew outwards, tossing the front few rows of skeletons up into the air and way over the walls. It wasn't enough — it didn't stop the hordes of skeletons closing in on him. He was barely managing to keep them at bay as their bullets and weapons glanced off him; it was only a matter of time before one of them nailed his weak spot. Over their heads he saw the roof of the pergola, still intact, on the ground and he waved an arm. The wind tugged it into the air. Like a giant throwing star it whizzed towards the skeletons, orbiting Percy and barrelling them all out of the way, breaking them into pieces.

Hades roared in anger as his army was decimated. From his hands sprang two beams of dark energy that he channelled towards Percy, who had no choice but to jump into the air and start spinning again. The energy this deflected took out nearly the entire front wall of the courtyard with the wrenched-open gates in it. The dead were standing beyond the boundary of the palace, their pale, almost transparent faces gaping in shock, pointing at the carnage that had allowed them to see into Hades's palace for the first time.

Hades stopped firing and took a deep breath, squinting at his spinning nephew. He slowly readied an energy ball in his hand, tossing it up and down casually as he really focussed on Percy. Suddenly he hurled the ball; he had done it just at the right time, at the point in Percy's revolutions when he was going his slowest. There was a loud crackle as the energy in the ball dissipated right in front of Percy and threw him out of his spin. He flew backwards, limbs trailing like a ragdoll, and hit the damaged wall. The impact of his body was so great that it took out a massive proportion of the already-teetering brickwork and Percy disappeared beyond the boundaries of Hades's palace.

"PERCY!" Annabeth yelled, already running towards him and escaping the clutches of Nico's groping hands, which weren't quick enough and were desperately trying to catch hold of her to stop her. He knew that this wasn't over.

"Annabeth, come back!" he called to her, standing up and emerging from behind the stalactite.

Still Annabeth ran, dodging smoking craters in the earth and vaulting over a fallen tree as she did so. The crumbled wall presented more of a challenge, however; there was so much rubble that it looked like a huge hill to climb and she hesitated long enough for Nico to appear out of the shadows and grab her by the waist, spinning her round and hurling them both to the floor.

"Let me go!" she yelled, trying to shove him off.

"This isn't over!" Nico hissed at her through clenched teeth, using the little bodyweight he had to pin her to the ground. "Don't be so stupid. You're going to get yourself killed."

"But Percy—"

"Isn't dead!" Nico said. "He's—" Nico didn't get a chance to finish his sentence; water began to trickle out of the smashed black bricks next to them, gushing faster and faster until it started to look like it was going to give Niagara a run for its money. Nico vanished with Annabeth in tow; they came to rest perched on top of part of the wall that still seemed pretty sound as water burst through below them, tossing huge chunks of masonry aside as if they were made of Styrofoam and revealing Percy, who had been trapped underneath the rubble.

The water began to rise rapidly in the garden, swamping everything. Riding the rapids just by standing on top of the torrent was Percy, who began to walk towards Hades across the lake he had created on liquid stepping stones. Hades was already up to his chest in water and was having difficulty taking control of the earth beneath him with so much of his brother's domain covering him. He spluttered and floundered a little; Percy smirked at him as an enormous geyser blew its top right underneath the god, blasting him high into the air.

"Thought I'd even the playing field," Percy said. "Hope you don't think it unsportsmanlike of me."

It was Hades's turn to flail as he flew through the air; when he came back down he hit the ever-deepening water with a splash that was disguised pretty quickly with seething white-water pounding at the point where he had fallen, forcing him down. When he thudded to the ground below the water he gave an enormous angry bellow, unleashing a stream of bubbles from his mouth, and reached down to the earth beneath him, digging his fingers in and wrenching open a huge round hole in what had been a flowerbed. He then used this physical connection to the earth to produce another spike of rock, which shot him upwards back into his domain.

The water swirled like a sink draining down the hole Hades had created, carrying with it all manner of debris that had been left around the garden by the battle. Hades laughed as the water stepping stones Percy was creating to walk on dissolved, sucked down towards the chasm in the middle of the garden. Percy fell backwards into the whirlpool, spluttering as he did so for the first and only time in an entire lifetime of being in the water. Steam was now rising from the hole Hades had created; apparently the water was being guzzled down into some deep part of Hades where magma was seething. Percy was caught up in the current, coming ever-closer to the sinkhole.

As he reached the edge he grabbed on with one hand; although he managed to get the water to pass over him (he would never have been able to hold on in the force of the whirlpool otherwise) he couldn't make the water obey him in any other way. The flow was too fast, too strong, as it thundered around him, deafening him. It was all he could do to hold on; he couldn't even think about stopping the water he had started, which was still pouring from its point of origin in the broken wall. He managed to swing a second hand up and clung on for his life. The greedy earth was gobbling so fast and so powerfully that there was nothing he could do but look down and see the hole's throat full of unquenchable magma deep below him until clouds of steam prevented him from even seeing the rock in front of his eyes.

His arms were shaking with the effort of hanging there. His fingers and hands were cramping and he screwed his eyes shut. He pressed his fingers down harder into the ground he was clinging to, squeezing harder and harder. Percy wasn't sure if he was yelling out loud or whether there was screaming inside his head as pain raced up his fingers into his arms, his shoulders, up into his neck and into his head…

Just as he was about to black out and let go, eight small cracks shot from the points where his fingers touched the earth, racing outwards away from the gaping maw below him. He took a huge gasp of air as relief burst through him, then concentrated hard as the cracks widened and deepened, finally encircling Hades's podium and toppling it over. Hades lurched and tottered backwards, falling with chunks of the rock he had just been standing on. He hit the water and was soon caught up in the same churning deluge that had forced Percy down into the hole in the middle of the garden. Hades circled, pulled by the current.

Just as the god was about to be dragged into the pit, an enormous rumbling seemed to shake the entire Underworld. A searing heat began to rise from the hole and Percy looked down, seeing the magma advance up towards him at an alarming rate, hissing and spitting as it did so and vaporising the water pouring down on it, blasting steam high up into the air. The current slowed so fast as the water evaporated that it left Hades beached, but the heat rising from below stopped Percy breathing; each breath in felt like it was turning his lungs to ash. The falling water combined with Hades's power began to reform the magma into solid rock but it wasn't cooling fast enough for Percy. There was something runny and extremely hot flowing beneath his toes — he suddenly realised that his shoes were melting right off his feet. His entire body was trembling, the tiny breaths he was managing to take felt like they were barbequing him from the inside.

He let out a yell or a sob, he couldn't tell which, until suddenly the heat became too much and water began cascading out of all of his pores. The heat exploded around him and he shot out of the hole like a cork from a bottle, riding on a jet of steam and debris just as the hole finally solidified and closed behind him, crusted over with a black and oozing cap of cooling lava, threaded with hot red veins.

Percy had nothing left and he knew it. He landed face-first in the mud and got a mouthful of the sodden, black earth. He barely had the energy to let it dribble out, bubbling as he exhaled. All he could see were white spots winking up at him from the ground. There was a high-pitched ringing in his ears and the floor slid in and out of focus as he lay there, totally unable to move.

Hades also appeared to be temporarily exhausted. He was on his hands and needs, soaking wet and also breathing hard but soon he managed to drag himself to his feet and walked over to Percy, looming over him. "You fought well, Jackson," he said, and Percy thought he actually heard respect in his voice despite the buzzing in his ears. "That's the second time you've almost defeated me. But here I still stand, and my answer remains the same. Your mother stays down here with me, but for your efforts, I will see that she is fast-tracked to the Isles of the Blest. My condolences for your loss." With that, he simply melted out of sight.

"Get me down," Annabeth said to Nico, but by the time she had finished her sentence they were already on the ground. Annabeth took off running through the mud, squelching her way towards Percy. She dropped to her knees next to him, panic hitching in her chest as she saw the dazed, faraway look he was sporting on his face. She tilted his head back and reached two fingers into his mouth just in case he was about to swallow his tongue, then rolled him over onto his side.

"Uh… what are you doing?" Nico asked, hovering next to them.

"First aid," Annabeth snapped back, not letting go of Percy's shoulder. "You know, trying to stop him dying. I can't believe you never learned any."

"If it's bleeding, stop it. If it's broken, fix it," Nico said, shrugging. "I got all I need."

Annabeth gritted her teeth and shot a glare at him before turning back to Percy. "Hey, are you listening?"

Percy nodded yes but didn't say anything else, instead continuing to stare blankly to his left. The world was sliding back into focus now and the white spots had stopped multiplying in front of his eyes but they hadn't left altogether. His forehead crinkled into a frown as he lay there. His brain was still recovering from the adrenaline spike and the power that he had used in the battle, and for a moment he was barely sure who he was, let alone why he was there, because of the pounding in his head. Then he remembered; he had come to retrieve his mother. Immediately, that blissful unawareness left him and he sat up too fast, his vision going dark at the edges for a few seconds as if he were about to faint.

"Lie down again," Annabeth demanded, placing a hand on Percy's shoulder and trying to force him down. He wouldn't move, just sat there rigidly staring at nothing.

"I didn't do it," Percy managed in a small voice, the words coming from a voicebox torn and strained with screaming and heat. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't beat him. She's not coming back."

"I'm sorry Percy," Annabeth said, grabbing his hand and holding in in both of hers. He didn't even respond to her touch; his hand sat limp in hers. "I'm so, so sorry about your mom. I can't even think about how much this hurts for you right now. But we need to go home now. Hades won. There's nothing else you can do here."

"No," Percy said. "No, I can still…" He stopped, not having any idea what there was left for him to do. All he knew what that his mother was gone and he had done everything possible to get her back, including duelling with the Lord of Death himself, and he had still failed.

"There's nothing left," Annabeth said again. "Please, Percy. Just come home."

"Look, Percy," Nico said. "You're running pretty low on juice right now. You couldn't go a round with a kitten let alone another ten more rounds with my father. You can't keep raiding your godly half for ways to get around this. You're starting to lose who you are."

Annabeth nodded. "Nico's right. For once. Your dad came to see us in the park, after you left, and he said… he said that you were changing. That what you were doing was tearing your mortal half to pieces and letting the god part invade it. Percy, you could become a god. You _will _become a god if you keep this up."

"What?" he asked, turning his head and focussing on her at the same time. "You're saying that I rejected the whole becoming a god thing when I was sixteen and now it's happening anyway?"

"It doesn't have to happen!" Annabeth said quickly, squeezing his still-unresponsive hand tighter. "All you have to do is stop this and we can try to fix what's left of you."

"Fix me?" Percy demanded, wrenching his hand out of Annabeth's, the thought of godhood blown from his mind buy a sharp burst of anger. "Fix me? My mom is dead because of me and you're talking about _fixing me_? How is that even possible? And what if I don't want to be fixed? You're saying that I should just forget about my mom and that will make everything better?"

"_No!_" Annabeth said, startled. "No, that's not what I mean. You're twisting what I'm saying. And Percy, please. We've been over this. Don't start blaming yourself for your mom's death. Get angry at Kampê, as angry as you like. She's the one that did this, not you. Don't get angry at yourself."

"I've been dreaming about it for _weeks_," Percy muttered. "All of those dreams that you wanted so desperately to get in on? They were about my mom dying. And I did nothing."

"You saw your mom dying in your dreams?" Annabeth said, not able to hide a small gasp. "Why didn't you tell me? We could have figured something out, kept her safe…"

"I didn't know it was her," Percy admitted, staring at the ground between his legs. "I just knew it was someone dying. Someone I cared about. I should have worked it out. We were by a lake, we were on the grass… how did I not know that that was my birthday picnic? I should have seen that. I should have cancelled the whole stupid thing to keep everyone safe. I should never have been that blind and stupid to see what was right in front of me. I should have done so much and I didn't. That's not just something you can _fix._"

"If you didn't know that it was her who was going to die how does that make you to blame?" Annabeth said gently. "Just… think about this logically for a minute."

"I can't think about anything else," Percy said hollowly.

"Annabeth's right, Percy," Nico said. "As much as that sucks to have to say. That's a whole lot of 'should haves' you just gave there. None of which were possible."

"I'm a half-blood!" Percy said angrily. "What good is that if I can't make the impossible possible? Greek gods and Mount Olympus on top of the freaking Empire State building? How is _that _possible either?"

"Calm down, Percy," Annabeth said fearfully, sure she had seen something spark at the edge of his eyes. "_Breathe_."

But the breaths Percy was taking got shorter and shorter as he once again began to surrender to his anger. Suddenly, another wave of nausea and pain hit him and he couldn't stand it; it stopped him in his tracks. He gasped, struggling to breathe before moaning in pain, clutching at his head. There was a searing pain in his chest as if his heart was being dragged out through his ribs. He let out an agonised sob, not even aware that his fingernails were starting to draw blood from his temples as he clutched at his skull.

"Percy!" Annabeth said, grabbing him by the shoulders. "Percy, what's happening? Talk to me."

"He's bleeding," Nico murmured in horror, watching blood trickle not just from the holes his nails were making but also slowly meandering its way from each nostril. "Why is he bleeding? He's Percy. He doesn't bleed."

"Something's tearing," Percy moaned. "Something is tearing inside and—" Another wave of pain took over and he couldn't speak anymore.

"It's starting," Annabeth said, her eyes darting back and forth as she desperately tried to figure out what to do. "The transformation. His mortal half must be being burned away. Okay, we can stop this. There has to be a way to stop this…"

Nico could only gape helplessly and spread his arms as Percy's body began writhing and spasming with pain. He didn't doubt that Annabeth was right, but what could they do about it? How were you supposed to stop something like this?

"Help me!" Annabeth barked, taking hold of Percy's head and kissing him gently on the forehead, then trying to extract a kiss from his sealed lips and clenched jaw.

"With what?" Nico asked, recoiling in horror. "Kissing him?"

"Help me with reminding him that he's human," Annabeth snapped. "Keep him grounded. Percy, listen to me. Listen. You are Percy Jackson. You were twenty-one today. You are a _mortal_." She hadn't let go of him and was still gently cupping his face, occasionally swiping his cheekbone with what she hoped was a soothing thumb.

Nico dropped to his knees next to Percy as well. "Whatever you think will work," he muttered. "Uh, come on, Perce. This isn't you. This was never _supposed_ to be you. You rejected this, remember? You _didn't want this._" He grabbed Percy's shoulder and gave it a little desperate shake, but nothing seemed to be registering. "You ate blue cake today. Just like that time I appeared on your fire escape and you force fed it to me. You like the stupidest things, like being at the beach with all that gross sand. You… you crashed your step-dad's car and blamed a monster. Come on, we've done tequila shots together."

"Where?" Annabeth asked, momentarily scandalised. "Where serves alcohol to minors?"

"This bar. I sort of know the guy who owns it. It's a long story and I don't think we have time for it now," Nico ended pointedly, looking at her incredulously for even bringing it up.

"Right…" Annabeth said, shaking her head. "Right. Percy—" She was cut off as his body began to glow, the light searing at her eyes. Panicking and not thinking properly she blurted out wildly, "I LOVE YOU! Will you marry me?"

The light stopped and the pain Percy was in seemed to diminish. "What?" he croaked, finally able to look up.

"Will you marry me, you idiot?" Annabeth said, smiling as tears prickled at her eyes as she saw Percy gradually return to normal.

"Seriously?" Percy asked her.

"No, duh, it's an April fool," Annabeth snorted, her voice choked with tears. "Why not? I love you, you love me…"

Percy was rendered temporarily speechless. "I… wow. Uh, this wasn't how I pictured it. I thought I'd get you flowers and there'd be you know, candles and stuff, and I'd be on one knee instead of knee-deep in Underworld mud… I thought you'd want it like that."

Annabeth scoffed. "Please. We're bleeding, filthy and we've nearly died. That pretty much represents our entire relationship. Now is the perfect moment."

Percy took a deep shaky breath in. "I… I need to think," he said eventually, grabbing her hand and giving it a swift kiss. He looked at her sadly, quirked a tiny, pained smile and dissolved into a cloud of mist, which vanished with a flash of lightning.

Annabeth sat backwards in the mud hard, not hearing the squelching noise or feeling it clinging to her. "He needs to think?" she repeated in a shell-shocked voice. "He has to think…"

"It stopped him going full-on god on us," Nico told her. "It must have meant something to him. Give him time. His mom just died."

"We don't have time," Annabeth said, tears threatening yet again for the umpteenth time that day. "He wants to think about it. About _me_…" She was rocking slightly back and forth as he said it, her eyes turning dead as they stared blankly into the middle distance.

Nico finally snapped. "Okay, I've had enough of this bullshit," he said, grabbing her arm and giving her a big shake. "Look at me and listen. What the Hades is up with you today? Seriously, you've been like… Annabeth lite for half the day and for the rest you've been a freaking basket case. This Annabeth doppelgänger mess that you've got going on here is actually starting to scare me. Plus it's pissing me off. You're whining about not having time but you keep going to some stupid far-off pit of despair and losing your mind on me, which is a pretty damn big waste of time if you ask me and yes, you are right. We _don't _have time for this. So for fuck's sake, pull yourself together, woman, and snap out of it. We have to find Percy again and I am not hauling along some ridiculous shell of the old Annabeth around as I look. Tell me what's up with you, get it out in the open and then cram it back deep down inside you and repress it so ridiculously hard that you can get your head back in the game, because quite frankly I'm sick of pandering to every single pathetic whim you have." He huffed out an angry sigh, relieved to have got that off his chest. "Understood?"

Annabeth turned to him and swallowed hard. "I'm sorry I keep freaking out but can't do this on my own," she said, biting her lip. "I can't lose him. I'm so scared that I'm going to lose him forever that I just keep freezing. What if I have to do this on my own… and I _can't_?"

"What?" Nico asked. "What are you talking about?"

Annabeth took a deep breath and said, "I… I think I might be pregnant."


	9. Chapter 9

**Hey everyone (if indeed there is an 'everyone' after I left it so long between updates).**

**I'm sorry that this chapter took so long to get out. I've not been feeling great recently, quite low and it took me a while to get out of that nasty little trough of a mood but I got there in the end. I kicked the sucker's ass. I'm still trying to teach myself not to go there in the first place but there we go. Such is life. **

**Sorry to the reviewers of the last chapter who didn't get replies this time around — it doesn't mean that I've stopped appreciating you (quite the opposite, I appreciate you all even more when I'm feeling like that) it just means that I've not been able to get around to leaving replies. For that I'm very, very sorry and I know that it makes me a terrible person. **

**Anyway, there is a chapter below. It's a little filler-y but sadly that had to be done. Next chapter and then a small epilogue will complete this story. I know exactly how everything's going to go down it's just a case of getting there. Hopefully I'll be much quicker at updating next time.**

**Of course, I am so grateful for everyone that reviewed/added me to their favourites/their alerts. Thank you guys so much. But a special thank you to****Orochi-Ne****, who sent me something to keep me amused in my hospital bed and for putting up with me even when I was being a very, very bad beta. Also thanks to ****AsterianWishes, whose insanely complimentary review made me feel like I was heading for the moon even when I was busy wallowing in a nasty pit of self-hatred and apathy.**

**An insanely large vat of gratitude is being dealt out to you all.**

**Marzipan.**

* * *

"I'm sorry, _what_?" Nico asked as soon as he had recovered enough to speak. "You're what? _Pregnant?_ How?"

Annabeth had been looking at the mud beneath her, her face flushing red after the bombshell she had just dropped, but her head snapped back up again as soon as she heard Nico's question. "What do you mean how?" she demanded. "Do you need a diagram? Because I left my whiteboard, marker pens and that handy little sex ed DVD of mine in my other jeans."

"No, I know _how_," Nico said. "It's just… weird that's all. I mean, this is you. You've got your entire life planned out until you're like forty-five—"

"Fifty-three," Annabeth promptly corrected him. "I realised I wanted to be done with the bulk of my life's work in terms of designing buildings by the time I'm forty-five. Fifty-three is when I get tenure as a professor of architecture at Yale."

"_See_?" Nico said. "You see why this is weird? You are ridiculously anal. Hilariously so. I make fun of you for it behind you back. And to your face, actually. This is totally not planned. How are you going to be trekking round the world designing stuff with blueprints under one arm and a kid balanced on the opposite hip?"

"I don't know, okay?" Annabeth said hotly, rounding on Nico. "Honestly, I don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead yet. I've been too busy getting slapped in the face by this whole thing. I can't think about the future yet. I just… I see everything falling apart when I do, which isn't exactly an attractive prospect and it's not like I don't have enough to deal with right now." Her voice ended on a low note as she envisioned her perfectly-planned trajectory into the future breaking into a thousand pieces.

Nico wrinkled his nose. "Weren't you being _careful_?"

Annabeth snorted angrily. "Of course we were being careful!" she snapped. "I do not need a contraception lecture from you. We used… _you know_. All the stuff we're supposed to use. I guess maybe when you're dealing with demigod sperm—"

"Holy mother of Zeus! Oh my… _Wow_, that's gross. I did not need that," Nico sputtered, cutting her off incredulously with frantic hand gestures. "Timeout! Warn a guy before you start dropping sperm talk bombs on him. This is not something I need to know."

Annabeth ignored him. "—and demigod ova…" she paused, already anticipating Nico's confused expression. "Demigod _eggs_," she continued. "I guess maybe you can't always contain them. I mean, you can't seriously tell me that none of the mortal parents of all of those kids at Camp didn't think about contraception before _they_ conceived. Maybe demigod gametes have similar kinds of powers to you know… bypass that kind of stuff?"

"I don't know what a gamete is and I don't want to," Nico said flatly. "Because no matter how scientific the language you're spouting this is still _disgusting._ Percy's _sperm_?Just… ugh. Let's get out of here. I thought I needed a shower _before _this conversation." He reached out and grabbed her arm and vanished into the shadows.

They seemed to have dragged a fairly large amount of Underworld mud with them as they vanished — loud squelching sounds sounded as soon as their feet were fully formed. Annabeth closed her eyes briefly, which was all of the energy she had left to expend for the mess they were creating. When she opened her eyes, she saw Paul still sitting on the sofa, his forearms resting on his thighs and still staring at the floor. His mug of tea hadn't been touched and was sitting on the coffee table in front of him. Rachel was looking out of the window, leaning against the wall and playing with a strand of hair, the end of which was in her mouth.

Paul looked up hopefully when they both arrived, his eyes desperately hungry for news. Annabeth swallowed hard at the look and was momentarily frozen by it like a deer in headlights. He looked so anxious and optimistic all at once. This was why she hadn't wanted Nico shooting his mouth off about _maybe _and _possibly _back when they'd been in the park. False hope, prolonging the agony… it was not good. Sucking in a deep breath to steel herself, she felt like an executioner when she had to almost imperceptibly shake her head at him.

She hated herself immediately as she watched him crumble back into himself as something behind his red-rimmed eyes winked out. He swallowed hard and his throat continued to bob, but it seemed that he was all cried out. His mouth was moving slightly, although it was impossible to tell if he was trying to get words out or not. As Annabeth watched he wriggled and pulled at his wedding ring until it came off with some difficulty, it never having moved from his finger in more than four years. He held it between his forefinger and thumb, rolling it back and forth as he stared at it.

Annabeth closed her eyes again and bowed her head, desperately trying to rake her hands through her hair but coming across tangles and knots and clumps of mud that she didn't think would ever wash out. Somehow, that had taken more out of her than the entire afternoon put together. Crushing someone's hopes and dreams was apparently a particularly arduous task.

Rachel turned around and practically dived across the room at them. "Are you okay? Where's Percy? What happened? Why… why are you so dirty?"

"Long story. It involves a tidal wave and a whirlpool," Annabeth said tiredly. "Percy… he took on Hades."

Rachel gasped. "Is he…" She couldn't finish her sentence, terror making the words stick in her throat. Instead she just put a hand to her mouth.

"He survived," Annabeth said. "Barely. But he's hanging in there. We managed to put off him going full-on god for a while but I don't know how long for. And I don't know where he went."

"But you're okay?" Rachel asked, her eyes searching Annabeth's face with a piercing gaze.

"Yeah… I'm fine," Annabeth said warily. "Muddy, tired, sore… but fine. Okay, why are you looking at me like that?"

"Need to borrow you," Rachel said briskly, grabbing her by the upper arm and dragging her towards the bedroom. "Won't take a minute," she said brightly to Paul and Nico, before slamming the bedroom door behind her. She let go of Annabeth once they were safely inside the bedroom and, she hoped, out of earshot.

Annabeth rounded on her immediately, folding her arms across her chest and setting her jaw. "What?" she demanded bluntly, no longer possessing the energy or the disposition to observe social niceties.

Rachel pulled something out of her pocket that was wrapped in a wad of tissue paper and put it down on the dressing table between them without saying anything. She shoved her hands in her back pockets almost guiltily, waiting for Annabeth to react to what she had placed there. Annabeth's face drained of even more colour if that was possible. She reached out for the pregnancy test and stared at it for a few seconds, then she sat down hard on the bed, the test slipping from her grasp and clattering to the floor as she put her head in her hands.

"I found it in the bathroom," Rachel said quietly. "I wasn't prying I just needed to use the bathroom and there it was, right on the edge of the sink and I thought, well, you know…"

"Does Paul know?" Annabeth asked sharply, looking up at her. _"_Did you tell him?"

"No!" Rachel said, almost shocked. "I wouldn't. Not without talking to you about it first. He didn't see it. I moved it before he needed to go in there."

"Oh gods, I can't believe I just left it there. I didn't get a chance to look at it," Annabeth said shakily, putting her head back in her hands and shaking her head. "I did the test, put it on the edge of the sink and the box said that I had to leave it for three minutes so I went back out into the living room and looked at the time and then Percy's mom came and I— I had so much to think about and then Percy and Nico turned up... How dumb am I? The time just ran away from me and I just… forgot that I'd left it there. I thought it was earlier than it was, that I had more time. _Stupid._ What if Percy's mom had had to use the bathroom? Or _Percy?_ Gods… _gods_… How could I just forget?" She continued to beat herself up inside over and over, the terrifying scenarios of someone other than Rachel coming across the test and asking her about it dashing through her brain.

"Percy doesn't know?" Rachel asked, her mouth falling open. "You haven't told him?"

"I didn't know! I only just did the test this morning," Annabeth said. She put a hand to her head and closed her eyes. "I've been so busy with his birthday and getting reading done before classes start again that by the time I looked at my diary and found out that I was _late_… I didn't even know for sure myself and I'm not just going to drop the pregnancy bomb on him without being certain."

Rachel went back to chewing on a strand of hair for a few moments. "Are you okay?" she asked eventually, sitting down next to her on the bed, putting her arm around her and giving her shoulder a small squeeze. "This is… this is _big_."

Annabeth looked up at her sharply. "What do you mean big?" she asked with an edge to her voice. "Did you check the result?"

Rachel blinked. "Yes, against the box. It was in the trash."

"And I _am_?" Annabeth asked in a small voice.

Rachel nodded. "Yes. Two little positive sign things. Pregnant according to the box. I'll go and get the box if you want and we can double-check but—"

"Jesus fucking Christ," Annabeth cursed, no Greek curse that would sound anywhere near as strong as she needed it to springing immediately to mind. "This is perfect. Just perfect. This is totally what I needed right now. I'm _so glad _this chose now to happen." She went back to shaking her head again, trying to get it into her brain. "You know what? I bet it was Hera that did this," she said bitterly. "She knew that I had everything planned out, that I didn't want kids yet and I bet she just thought it would be _hilarious _to come and shoot me with her little fertility ray or whatever the hell it is she uses to screw with my plans."

"What are you going to do?" Rachel asked.

"Take a shower," Annabeth said determinedly, shrugging and getting to get feet, slapping her hands on her thighs. "And then try and figure out how to find Percy."

"I mean about… you know."

Annabeth inhaled deeply. "Not now," she said. "I'll deal with that later. Too much to think about all at once. I'm going to wash this crap off me." She walked to the bedroom door and opened it, emerging back into the light again. They really ought to open the curtains in the bedroom, but the mere thought of it seemed too much for her.

Paul seemed to have emerged slightly from his catatonia. He was watching the TV now, albeit with the volume turned almost all the way down. His wedding ring was firmly back on his finger. Annabeth saw him watching the news, which seemed to be focussed entirely on aerial shots of Central Park and the aftermath of the carnage, especially on Fifth Avenue.

"What are they saying about it?" Annabeth asked interestedly. What the Mist made mortals see always fascinated her.

"Freak weather front," Paul murmured. "Storm front combined with a tropical storm that's apparently off the coast of Florida. And a gas leak that the lightning ignited. If only they knew, huh?"

"At least that's one less thing to worry about," Annabeth said gratefully. "Where's Nico?"

"Shower," Paul said. "He was pretty dirty."

Annabeth growled in annoyance. "Of course he is. He pulls this crap every morning." She whirled around and hammered on the bathroom door with her fist. "Nico! If you use all of the hot water so help me! And don't you dare use any of my shampoo!" she yelled through the bathroom door at him.

"Can't hear you!" Nico yelled back. "I'm going to use some of your shampoo okay?"

"My to-do list keeps getting longer and longer," Annabeth said through gritted teeth. "Take a shower, find Percy, kill Nico."

"Now would be the perfect time," Rachel said evenly. "I mean, the blood would just wash right down the drain."

"I'd rather mop up blood than go in there and see him naked," Annabeth said. "Sorry to ruin a good plan and all but there's only so much gross a girl can handle."

Rachel took a quick look over her shoulder to check that Paul was still listening to the TV. She bowed her head towards Annabeth before speaking quietly. "Does Nico know?"

Annabeth nodded, then started shaking her head. "Yeah. I, uh, I told him. I don't know. I was kind of falling apart and he has this knack of getting things out of people."

Rachel put a hand on Annabeth's arm and searched her grey eyes. "And now?" she asked gently, her eyes squinting slightly at the edges.

Annabeth took a long shaky breath in and an equally shaky one out. As she wrapped her arms around herself she shrugged and flashed a tight smile. "Now I'm not falling apart so fast," she said. "I can't be that self-indulgent. There's no time for that right now."

"I've been trying to get some kind of read on Percy," Rachel said. "That's not the way the Oracle works but I've been trying. I figure she owes me a favour or two for, you know, using me to wander around and see stuff and eat gelato… I prefer frozen yoghurt but you've got to let her have some things. I don't think I want to see her cranky."

"Thanks… I think?" Annabeth said, managing to crack an actual smile at one of Rachel's trademarked tangents.

"Right. Percy. Don't thank me. I'm going nowhere fast. No visions, no… nothing. I'll keep trying." Rachel squeezed Annabeth's arm once more and nodded over the blonde's shoulder. "Looks like you can at least tick off the shower part of your to-do list."

Nico emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his waist and clutching a ball of dark clothes to his chest. "Do you think we could hit a laundromat?" he asked. "These are so muddy they don't even look black anymore."

"And of course that's what important," Annabeth said, rolling her eyes. "Let me at that shower. This is nearly as bad as the time the Aphrodite girls got me to do a mud face pack _thing_." She gave herself a shake at the memory, pulling a face, before turning towards the bathroom and closing the door.

"She's not going to be happy about the mess I left in there…" Nico confided in Rachel. "Washing off mud is hard without getting it everywhere."

"NICO!" Annabeth yelled right on cue. "I scrubbed the crap out of this tub this morning!"

"Told you," Nico said. "I'm going to go and get dressed." He disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door.

Rachel sighed and looked between the two closed doors, then back at Paul and closed her eyes briefly. She had known Percy for so many years now, Annabeth and Nico too, that they were practically family. She didn't have any siblings of her own and other friends couldn't share the part of her that belonged to this world. Hating what was happening to her friends and feeling useless, she slumped against the wall and slid down, hugging her knees and pushing her kneecaps into her eye sockets and enjoying the dark and relative calm the pressure brought. Before she knew it, she felt her brain start to dim and her body begin to sag. Big visions like the one she'd had in the old folks' home always exhausted her, but adrenaline had kept her body pumping because she had known that she had to reach Percy. Then abusing the Oracle's powers to protect herself from monsters had drained her even more and she barely had time to feel surprise at how fast she was falling asleep before she was totally gone.

She wasn't sure exactly how long she'd been asleep. The sky was a little darker, but then the day had been on its way out anyway. She swallowed, her mouth uncomfortably dry and turned her head to the right, ignoring an ominous creak at the back of her neck. Paul was still sitting on the couch and watching the TV, but Annabeth and Nico were standing behind the couch, their mouths open slightly in shock. Annabeth's hair was wet and she had a towel in her hand; judging by the frizz on one side of her head she'd been rubbing it dry and had stopped abruptly, the towel still aloft, at seeing the TV. Nico's hair was also wet, although he had taken a comb to it and slicked it backwards. Annabeth was wearing a blue terrycloth robe that was clearly Percy's because it drowned her; Nico had his trademark black skinny jeans and boots on but was equally swamped by an aqua blue t-shirt with a surfer on the front, riding a huge tidal wave on a golden surfboard.

When he heard her moving, Nico turned briefly to address her. "Hey, sleepy head. Good of you to re-join us."

Rachel ignored the barbed comment and murmured, "What's going on?" Climbing to her feet, she unsteadily made her way towards the kitchen and picked up an abandoned mug, filling it from the tap and drinking it down greedily to fix her cotton mouth. She filled the mug again and drank before leaving it in the sink and turning around. "And what are you _wearing_?"

"I didn't have as many clean clothes here as I thought, okay?" Nico said defensively, turning round. "Believe it or not, this is one of the most sombre things in Percy's freaking wardrobe."

Rachel rolled her eyes. "Now that useless piece of information is out of the way, what's with the obsessive TV-watching?" She peeked over their shoulders. The screen looked like it was tuned into some kind of disaster movie; aerial images blurred and refocused, shifting and juddering in a way that made her feel queasy as the helicopter the camera was in was buffeted around through the air. Below them rain was lashing down on piles of rubble which had slid into the streets from collapsed buildings. The picture changed; a woman was cowering under a big umbrella with a news corporation logo emblazoned on it, a microphone clutched in one hand as the other fought desperately to keep the wind out from underneath the umbrella so it wouldn't be whipped away. Lightning flared overhead, followed immediately by a massive thunderclap.

"The whole of downtown Los Angeles is in chaos!" she screamed at the camera, struggling to be heard above the wind. "The city was already reeling from the enormous 8.8 earthquake that shook the area, badly damaging some buildings, when in just moments what had been clear blue skies clouded over seemingly instantly, bringing an unprecedented amount of rain to the area. As we speak, storm drains are overflowing, some roads are already like rivers and totally impassable and the authorities are attempting to move the population in the lower-lying areas of the city to safety. People are trapped in the debris. The Governor has mobilised the army to help out the overstretched emergency services. Aftershocks continue to wreak havoc—" The umbrella was finally wrenched from her grasp; it was torn inside out and gusted away on the wind. She was immediately drenched and the sluicing rain, which was practically driving sideways, screwed with the mic so badly she could no longer be heard.

"Oh, gods," Rachel said. "You don't think…?"

"Percy was beat after the fight," Annabeth said, her wide eyes glued to the TV as shots of nose-to-tail cars, red taillights glowing demonically through the pounding rain, each containing people desperately tried to leave the city. "I don't think he could have got far. And what with DOA Recording Studios being a convenient exit right in the middle of L.A.…"

"He must have charged himself up pretty quickly," Nico said grimly. "That can't be a good sign."

"I've got to find him," Annabeth said, suddenly realising that she was holding the towel aloft and returning to working at the other side of her head with it. "If I can just get him to _listen_, for just a minute, I know I can bring him back."

"We don't know where he is," Nico said bluntly. "And it might be too late. 8.8 is a _huge_ earthquake. Do you think that he's still him if he's wielding that kind of power?"

"We don't know until we try," Annabeth said, her eyes glinting with stormy determination. "Anyway, that earthquake might not even have been him using his powers on the surface. It might have just been triggered thanks to all of the jiggling the fault lines probably got from a god and a demigod raging war pretty much underneath the city." She paused and looked accusingly at Nico. "And so what if he's not still him? Are we just supposed to abandon him?"

"He'll be a _god_!" Nico countered with in frustration. "As in proper, full on, I'll incinerate you with one look at me god!"

Annabeth's nostrils flared. "He _might _be a god. I am not going to abandon him until I know for sure." Her mind was racing; half of it seemed to be occupied with finding Percy, but the other half couldn't help but run through what it took to put buildings up in prime earthquake territory like L.A. Rebar, reinforced masonry, base isolation, tuned mass dampers… Some of the buildings she had seen on the news had practically been turned inside out by the quake and to think that Percy might have done it made her go cold from the inside out.

There was a slightly tense standoff during which Nico took a long, hard steady look at her and saw nothing wavering behind her eyes. "Okay then," he said eventually, caving with a small shrug and feeling any opposition to her plans winking out. There was nothing that was going to deter Annabeth from this course of action; it dawned on him that she was so determined because she had some kind of deeper faith in Percy than he did. He suddenly realised that it stung a little to discover that she knew Percy better, but then that was probably to be expected. The fact that she had this unshakeable confidence in Percy was all he needed. If Annabeth thought that there was still hope then he'd go to the ends of the earth and take her with him to find Percy. "Okay. Then we find him. I'll take you wherever you need to go." He spread his arms wide and gave her a half smile.

Annabeth narrowed her eyes slightly and cocked her head. "What's this?" she asked. "This is a new attitude for you."

Nico grinned a little wider, gave a small snort of a laugh and bobbed his head abashedly. "Yeah… It kind of is. Look, I don't know." He sighed and scratched at the back of his head. "Don't, like, write this down so you can quote me later or anything but… there isn't a lot of stuff that I trust. Child of the Underworld, doesn't play well with the other demigods… you know. I see death all the time. I've seen people _murdered_, and not just kids from camp in battles but just actual mortal civilians out there in the world. I've seen people throw other people's lives away like they mean nothing.

"Look, hardly anyone has ever given me anything to trust in them. And I don't trust things, either. Not since the casino where I trusted that it was all real and everything was okay and it all turned out to be a lie to erase the death of my mother. I see a whole bunch of the suckiest elements of humanity all the time and I know I have a ton of other issues too that I'm not going to drag up right now but… yeah. Pretty much the entire human race _sucks _and I wouldn't trust them any farther than I could throw them but I do trust you and Percy. And I suppose that means that I also trust the connection you've got going on. I never realised that before but I do. When it comes to Percy you're the authority. If you feel this is right, it must be."

Annabeth felt tears prickling in her eyes and she gave herself a mental shake to stop her lower lip trembling. What Nico had said had really touched her, but it had also given her hope. He was right, she recognised. She and Percy _did_ have a connection on whatever level, probably a level she didn't even understand, and suddenly she could feel it now more strongly than ever.

"Well, that was just beautiful," she said to Nico, aiming for sarcasm and probably not quite reaching. "Thank you for sharing."

Nico rolled his eyes and shook his head but stayed silent, a feat that pretty much shocked Annabeth to the core.

Rachel squeezed past them to lean against the back of the couch facing them. She got both of them in her eye line and then put a hand on both of their arms. "Okay, guys. Focus now. Task force. We've got to work this out. Where is he going to be?"

"Somewhere high," Annabeth said instantly, turning away from Rachel to begin pacing. "He's hurting, he's wreaking havoc; it's cathartic for him and he's going to want some kind of vantage point so he can see it. High up, but not too close to the destruction because he doesn't want to risk mortals seeing him because they might try to interfere. If he's connected enough to the earth and the storm then he should be able to feel the effects of what he's doing without having to be right on top of it. So…" She gave a frustrated snort and began to pace faster.

Nico also turned away from Rachel to watch Annabeth pace. "Skyscrapers?" he suggested. "Tall buildings."

"Maybe…" Annabeth said slowly, the idea not really clicking with her. "But if he is we need specifics. We can't go around appearing on top of every skyscraper in the city. We haven't got time."

"The Hollywood sign," Rachel suddenly said calmly, blinking away green mist swirling at the corners of her eyes. "I think… You're both wearing his things. When I touched you, that's whatI got. He's hurting, Annabeth."

"Get ready," Annabeth told Nico abruptly. "I'm going to get dressed. Give me two minutes." She ran full tilt for the bedroom and slammed the door hard behind her.

Nico turned to Rachel. "What else did you see?" he asked her, having noticed the hesitation in her voice when she was talking to Annabeth.

Rachel sighed and closed her eyes. "He's pretty far gone," she admitted, not opening her eyes and feeling her body deflate. "Unless demigods are involved in prophecies, unless they're the subject of the whims of The Fates or the grand design or whatever they don't usually register on my radar. I'm not a demigod lojack; they have to _mean _something or be important in terms of their destinies for them to even get a look in when it comes to the Oracle. She couldn't care less about the location of some kindergartener son of Iris playing in a sandbox you know? For him to pop up like that… something big must be happening, Nico. You know where he is but I'm not sure what you'll find when you get there."


	10. Chapter 10

**Hello everyone.**

**I really wish I had an excuse for me taking so long to update but I just don't. I suck! My one excuse would be that I spend my days writing thousands and thousands of words on obscure topics as my job and staring at the computer for 8.5 hours a day and typing isn't really conducive to me wanting to come home and do the same thing. Plus, I suck.**

**This was quite a difficult chapter to write because I felt it needed a lot of emotional investment by me, which meant that I had to write it in little tiny baby steps because generally I just don't have excessive amounts of emotional energy to spare. ****I really hope that this chapter turned out okay in the end after the long, long, LONG time it took to update it. After this, I was planning an epilogue but it may run on so long it needs to be a closing chapter instead. We shall see.**

**I need to remind everyone who has read/reviewed/favourited this that your responses truly mean the world to me. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for wanting to stick with me.**

**Marzipan.**

* * *

Nico had a slightly unfortunate habit of raiding lost and found departments of various institutions (the subway, museums, libraries) via shadow travel. It satisfied his borderline-klepto tendencies without actually having to resort to real stealing, which was apparently frowned upon and illegal according to Annabeth, even if you didn't get caught. Nico always wanted _stuff_ — perhaps it was some kind of hangover from his father being the god of wealth, the desire to surround himself with things, even if they weren't of any monetary value. Yet even given who his father was, Nico wasn't entirely sure where his weird impulse to collect stuff came from; it certainly didn't go with the mostly-nomadic lifestyle that he had. He was a wanderer, slipping in and out of the shadows at will and you couldn't cart things with you on that kind of journey but, inexplicably, he wanted them anyway.

Too-large, odd leather gloves; a rainbow of scarves; pairs of glasses he couldn't see out of; paperbacks with badly scarred spines that he had little intention of reading; nearly a hundred cell phones with batteries long flat; single earrings without partners; an actual ukulele and umbrellas innumerable crowded the matchbox he called an apartment. At his insistence, he and Annabeth had stopped off at his apartment and from his collection he had selected the biggest umbrella and he had opened it over their heads before vanishing again.

When they reappeared the rain pouring down was like someone was emptying buckets on top of the umbrella. Annabeth actually gasped at the sudden transition but the noise was mostly swallowed by the torrents of water pounding on the nylon overhead. Nico was too used to accidentally appearing smack bang in the middle of adverse weather to do much other than grunt, but the ferociousness of the storm still took him slightly be surprise.

Though it was still early enough for it still to be light on the west coast, the storm overhead had brought a veil of ugly, greenish-grey twilight across the southern Californian sun. The rain was coming down so hard that the world outside of the umbrella was blurry and grey and Annabeth had to squint to see through it. In front of them, the chain-link security fence at the back of the Hollywood sign had been torn to pieces; coils of barbed wire were sticking up haphazardly from the shredded fence and the sign warning them not to trespass looked like it had been punched in the middle and was lying half in the mud that was rapidly forming under the rain.

Annabeth bit her lip and glanced anxiously behind her at the hills stretching up and away from them; these were the perfect conditions for a big mudslide.

Together, hampered by the umbrella, they began to pick their way down the steep slope, hopefully in the direction of Percy. The ground underneath them was sodden and loose rocks that had come out of their hard-packed bedding as the soil above them was washed away kept skittering away from them; Nico ended up snatching at Annabeth's arm more times that he would like to admit as he repeatedly lost footing and had to stop himself from falling.

As they got to the bottom of the slope and their shoes became more and more filled with water and mud, they could see a figure that looked tiny when compared to the giant letters; Percy was perched in the middle of the first 'O' of the sign with his back to them, an arm coiled around one of the vertical steel rods holding the landmark in place.

Annabeth felt an immediate tug at her heart when she saw him — once again, he just looked _tiny_, which was never a word that she would have used to describe Percy before. She immediately abandoned her hold on the handle of the umbrella and lurched forward towards him, shoving it at Nico so hard that he overbalanced and slipped and slithered down the muddy slope until he grabbed the thin trunk of a gnarled tree that had been stunted and twisted by trying to pick out a living on the hot, dry hillside. He cursed; the umbrella had been ripped from his hand and was left somewhere up the slope and the rain had already drenched him through in the short time it had taken him to slide. His palms were in shreds from the fall and from grabbing the tree; Percy's shirt had snagged on something and was hanging off one shoulder.

Annabeth fared worse; she immediately went over on her ankle as soon as she broke away from Nico. Something went pop deep within the joint and she knew from bitter battle experience that the warm and wet feeling that was trickling through her ankle was on the inside not the out. She bit out a short screech at the pain and immediately switched her weight to her good foot but too quickly and also lost her balance. She fell on her face and felt her top tooth pierce her bottom lip and skin graze off her chin. When she put her hand down it sunk into the mud.

"Percy!" she yelled over the sound of the rain. She managed to struggle to her feet and give another shout but it was drowned out by a roll of thunder. Her hair was wetter now than when she had got out of the shower and she scraped it back from her face. Percy either couldn't hear her or was choosing to ignore her and she felt her jaw tighten in determination. To her right, Nico was clawing his way back up towards her, his gritted teeth the brightest thing about his face as he glared at her. "I didn't _ask _you to bring that stupid umbrella!" she shouted, scowling back at him.

She had to press her eyes shut against a burst of lightning bearing down on them; it was so bright she saw the red blood inside her eyelids. When she opened them again, tiny spots were dancing in front of her face for a minute and she thought she was imaging the bluish hew dancing around Percy's head but she wasn't — he appeared to have conducted the lightning and was wearing it as a spitting, crackling, lopsided crown. Panic momentarily fluttered in her chest at the sight before she squeezed it away. Though it made him _look _like a god there was no reason to believe that he had actually become one yet. She knew that she could still pull him back from this if he would just _let her_.

"Percy!" she yelled again, going sideways down the slope towards him and doing her best to ignore the pain stabbing through her ankle. "Please talk to me!" She finally reached him and put her hand on his arm; despite him being soaked it was warm, hot even, and the veins she could see beneath the surface of the skin were pulsing with gold. "You have to stop this right now," she demanded of him.

He wouldn't meet her eyes, just kept staring out over the valley that was being hammered by the storm. "It's happening," he eventually mumbled quietly, barely audible above the wind and the rain.

"Not if you stop," Annabeth said fiercely, giving his arm a shake. "You can fight to stop this. Just… fight it Percy. Please. For… for me."

Any logic that she had planned to apply to sway him failed her, leaving as if it had never been there. She had been rehearsing arguments in her head that told him why he needed to stop, what he was doing to himself, what he was doing to the world, but they had all vanished in favour of raw, emotional appeals. Seeing the colour of his blood flowing through his veins, she wondered how much time she had left before it turned totally to golden ichor.

It was time that was pressing her; she didn't have much of it left and the only thing she could truly give him in that time wasn't a rational, reasonable argument: it was her. When it came down to it, when it was all stripped away, all it came down to was just _her_. In this exact moment, all she could really give to him was herself, totally and unconditionally. It didn't come down to words or wisdom or reason or logic but it was just her, body, heart, mind and soul, throwing both caution and herself to the wind and hoping that what she could give to him would be enough to save the both of them.

"I _love _you," she told him, feeling her nose and her eyes prickle and biting back a sob that would have swallowed the last syllable had she let it. "Oh, gods, Percy. I love you _so much _and I can't stand here and watch you become a god. No, you know what? I _won't _stand here and watch that happen. You turned this down when you were sixteen for me, for _us_ and now you're just going to do it anyway? Do I really mean that little to you?"

She was holding her breath and even had her busted lip trapped in her teeth just waiting for Percy to say something, anything, in response. Maybe he had no idea what to say. It's not like she resorted to emotional blackmail every day of their lives; perhaps it was so unfamiliar he couldn't work it out. She was not the kind of person to go around trying to make people feel guilty to get them to do her bidding. Annabeth was not manipulative by nature — if she wanted something from people she'd request it brazenly rather than tiptoeing around the issue, dropping hints and trying to extract information or things she wanted from people with underhand tactics.

She sucked in the blood that was still blooming from her lip; the rain was beginning to force pale pink streaks of her blood down her chin as what trickled from her lip mingled with rainwater. She was hovering, still waiting for Percy to say something, and was acutely aware of the pounding in her chest.

"You mean so much to me," Percy mumbled eventually, allowing Annabeth to exhale gratefully. "It feels like my guts are getting shredded thinking that I have to leave you, Annabeth. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do without you."

"You're not going to do anything without me," Annabeth told him, giving his arm another shake to try and yank him off the path that he was on. This got very little response, so she reached out a hand and placed it on the side of his head, swinging his face around to look at her so they could see eye-to-eye. "Look at me. Percy, look at me. You are not going anywhere. You can stay on Earth if you want to. It's not too late. You still have a _choice_."

She wasn't sure that Percy was actually seeing her — what she saw in his eyes were two long, empty tunnels. The dark had blown his pupils so wide that there was hardly any trace of the green irises that she knew so well and the larger, dark pupils made them look all the more empty and dead. She saw a tiny shift in his eyes that might have been him focussing on her own face and she latched onto that, desperately searching is face for anything that might be him caving.

"You're hurt," Percy said quietly, a tiny frown crinkling his forehead. He reached out his own hand and cupped Annabeth's face; she felt water trickling into her various wounds and the smell of the ocean gathered in her nose as the injuries knitted closed.

Annabeth grabbed Percy's hand with both of hers and squeezed it before he could retract it altogether, pressing her fingers into the callouses on his palm that had been ground out by sword-fighting before he had become invulnerable. She felt like she could draw a map of both his palms, circling all of the rough spots, just through all the times that he had touched her, even in the smallest, most insignificant and nonsexual way. Her own hands weren't without their own irregularities — though knife fighting generally did not have the same strain on the hands as sword fighting did, she had burns from hot glue guns and scars covering nicks and cuts that she had sliced out of herself using an X-Acto knife.

She refused to let go of his hand even when Percy tried hard to extract it from his grasp. Percy just stared without emotion at the connection she was forcing on him, seeing for the first time that his veins were glowing faintly under the skin. He looked away and swallowed hard, closing his fist and tugging it as gently as he could away from Annabeth.

"I'm sorry, Annabeth," he said morosely, closing his eyes. "This won't stop. LA is _drowning _because of me. Look at it." He waved an arm at the valley below them, which was still getting inundated by the storm. "Do you think I want LA to be under a mile of rainwater? I don't but that's what's happening and I am sitting here watching it and there's nothing I can do about it. There are _people _down there. In case you haven't noticed, my role in life seems to be to save people and I'm having to sit here watching a whole city be terrorised by something that I started. Don't you think I would stop this if I could?"

They both turned quickly at hearing a loud scoff from behind them. Annabeth had almost forgotten that Nico was there. He was standing there with his arms folded and an eyebrow cocked.

"'It's gone too far'?" he echoed incredulously. "Really Percy? You are the strongest person I have ever known and I'm not talking about physical strength or invulnerability here. Those are just a couple of added bonuses you've got going on. You crossed an entire continent when you were just eleven years old. Before you were sixteen, you were facing Kronos all the freaking time without ever backing down. Also, do you know how many people have tried the River Styx thing and turned to ash? You clawed yourself out of that river using your connection to the mortal world. What is this bullshit about being too late? What's inside you right now is powerful. Strong. But _you are stronger._ You're Percy freaking Jackson. Get on board with that already."

Percy managed a rueful smile. "You mean to say that you knew the river had killed nearly everyone who tried that and still asked me to dive in anyway? Thanks for that, Nico."

"Hey, it worked didn't it?" Nico said defensively. "And besides, I _knew _it would work. Like I said, you were strong enough then and you're even stronger now."

Annabeth also managed a slight smile. "You know, if you let Nico persuade you and not me I'm going to be pretty pissed," she said quietly to Percy.

The smile Percy gave quickly slid off his face and he started to shake his head. He sighed deeply and his body seemed to sag in on himself when he exhaled. "No. I'm sorry guys but no. I still don't know how to stop this. If it even can be stopped." He gestured around himself, spreading his arms to the rain pouring down. "This whole thing isn't mine anymore," he said, and for a split second he looked truly frightened. "I can't just turn it off. It won't let me. It's gone too far and got too strong and I don't know what's happening anymore." His words were running away from him as he desperately tried to explain what was happening to him, why full godhood was just around the corner for him whether he wanted it or not. He could feel the power building and building inside him; it had started just after the storm had become autonomous.

"What can I do?" Annabeth asked urgently and determinedly, still refusing to let go of his hand and shifting around awkwardly so that their eyes could meet, which was less than easy when your boyfriend was sitting in the middle of a giant white, corrugated metal letter planted on a steep incline.

Call it the demigod ADHD, but half of her brain began to stray, thinking about what their life would be like if situations like this were not the norm and didn't just crop up. Without the world of the gods, they wouldn't even have met, sure, but say they had, just as two normal eleven-year-olds, with 'normal' Percy lying in bed and 'normal' Annabeth sitting there wrinkling her nose as drool soaked into his pillow? Where would their lives have progressed from there without The Labyrinth or Kronos or Sirens or Medusa or Scylla or freaking _Hera _and her cow obsession? It gave her an ache in her chest to think what would have happened if they'd never fought alongside each other, never plotted and schemed and trekked and quested. It was the world that they inhabited, the one with gods and demigods and Camp Half-Blood, that had drawn them together and it was that world that was now tearing them apart, claiming Percy as its own.

This world had taken so much from her. She'd pretty much raised herself, living year-round in a Camp filled with kids with armour and weapons, torn from her father and her siblings. It had taken Luke from her, first by turning him against the gods, then transforming him into Kronos, then eventually that one fleeting moment in the throne room with her knife… It had taken Thalia, the third person in their triumvirate (which was their own mini version of a family, given the fact they she'd fled from hers, driven away by monsters), by turning her into a tree and then as soon as she was back into a Huntress. Until she had met Percy, all the world had ever done was take from her, leaving her alone and abandoned and then, suddenly, as if to make up for that there was Percy, a shining beacon of hope that the world had just handed to her as if it were trying to make up for everything it had stolen from her.

And that was why she was asking what she could do, and not just to Percy. She was screaming at the world in general, wondering what she could do to keep the man she loved with her when it was trying to take back the gift it had given her and it was hurting so badly that her immediate thoughts were to do nothing but fall to her knees and sob. She was Annabeth Chase, mistress of plans and strategies, and never in her entire life had she felt this paralysed, not even when she was staring down at Luke and he was asking her if she loved him. Even then the answer had been clear to her, despite the fact that Luke was lying there dying — no, she didn't love him, not in that way. She never had and she never would.

Percy was smiling again, but it was a sad smile. His eyes met hers and were filled with nothing but pity. "You're too hard on yourself," he said, raising the hands she was holding his own hand with to his lips and kissing them gently. "You always do this thing where you think you fix things, make things better. You expect to be able to make everything okay and sometimes you just _can't_, okay? There are some things that not even you can fix. Some things that aren't even _meant _to be fixed. Remember that."

Annabeth pressed her lips together to stop them trembling and so it took her a while to say anything; in the meantime she just shook her head at him, feeling her eyes fill up with tears. "I don't think I can," she said eventually, her voice cracking. "How am I meant to just carry on knowing that I can't fix this? That I can't fix you or us?" She frowned, suddenly feeling anger flare within her, which served to stem the tears. "Oh gods, you know what? Why am I crying?" She angrily swiped at her eyes and clenched her teeth. "You are _not_ going to do this to me. I am _not_ going to let you." Her jaw was jutted in determination as she shook the hand she was holding in a jerking motion, never letting her eyes leave his. "Percy you are the best damn thing that has ever happened to me and by Zeus I am not going to stand here and let you tell me that I can't stop you from leaving me. I _won't_."

Percy gently disengaged his hand from hers and held them up to her like he was a surgeon that had just scrubbed up. "Look," he said softly, referring to the golden glow his skin was starting to emit. "Look, Annabeth. This is happening. Neither of us want it to but it's happening and I don't know how to stop it, okay? Do you think I actually want to go? Because I don't. If I could I would stay with you forever. Or at least until you got sick of me, anyway."

Annabeth gave a tiny laugh and rolled her eyes; that would never happen. She swallowed. Inside her, a battle was raging. She wanted to scream at him that he had to stay because she was pregnant and they were going to have a baby and she needed him for that, but it felt like that would open her up too much to a world of hurt. If she told Percy about the baby and that she needed him on Earth for her sake and for their baby's sake and Percy entered godhood anyway, which is what he seemed resigned to do, she wasn't sure she could ever forgive him.

Plus it was nudging once again into emotional blackmail territory. He had embraced his godly powers to start with, relishing using them and not stopping until it was probably too late. First it had been for vengeance, then for grief, but Annabeth wondered if, deep down, he didn't _want_ to stop. She had no idea how it worked when a mortal became a god — did they leave all their mortal problems, anxieties, issues and pains on Earth when their human form was burned away and reborn as a god?

She wondered if maybe he was doing this to escape the pain, because becoming a god must feel easier to him at the moment that sitting down and grieving for his mother. If she told him that he had to stay because of the baby, then she was manipulating him into doing something that he didn't want to do, and what if, in that case, he never really forgave her for throwing it in his face, for making him feel mortal pain and grief when he could have avoided it altogether? That would have seemed absurd and ridiculous just forty-eight hours ago but she wasn't sure she knew Percy anymore. What was in front of her was rapidly becoming less and less like the guy she had fallen in love with — how could she say anymore what his thoughts and feelings and motivations were?

"But come on," Percy continued. "It's not like we're strangers to the universe deciding it's going to play puppeteer and jerk us around and make us do stuff that we had no idea we were going to do, is it? That's just the way the ambrosia crumbles when you live in the world that we live in. This is no one's fault. There is nothing anyone could have done. It's just what had to happen, like how the whole going up against Kronos gauntlet got chucked at my feet. You couldn't have stopped that any more than you could have stopped this. Fate. Destiny. Prophecies. Oracles. Notice how they're all just long words for the same thing? Big, unavoidable junk that's going to screw your whole life up."

"Percy, the storm _is _still part of you," Nico said stubbornly. "I know that right now it feels too powerful to belong to you but hey, you started it. You end it. And are you even listening to yourself? Did _any _of that last piece of waffle sound like you? Seriously?"

"I'm trying to say goodbye, Nico," Percy said coldly, not turning towards him. Then he had second thoughts and turned to look at him, feeling anger rising in his chest. "Wait, so in the world according to Nico, how am I meant to sound when I'm telling someone I love that I have to go? Am I meant to sound like normal, regular Percy? Because, hey, this isn't something normal Percy does on a daily basis."

Nico blew a raspberry. "Yawn. Snooze. You know what? I'm just going to say it. You're telling me that you're saying sayonara to us and this whole _world _because you've gone and got yourself a case of the Edward Cullen sparklies? You yanked yourself out of this down there in the Underworld so come on. Get your ass back into gear and actually _try_."

"Don't you think I'm trying, Nico?" Percy yelled, his face contorting with anger. "What the fuck do you think I'm sitting here doing, having a _picnic_? Down in the Underworld I wasn't this far gone. Did you see an out of control, unstoppable storm raging around me down there? Did you? Do you have any idea what this is like for me? _I can't stop_."

"Then try harder," Nico said stonily. "And if we're going to be dropping F-bombs all over the place, then I'm just going to say it. You are being fucking melodramatic. Get over yourself and get back on the mortal plane where you belong."

Percy spun so fast that he nearly knocked Annabeth over. He was seething as he looked at Nico. "_Melodramatic_?"

A massive gust of wind caught the two 'L's in the sign and, with a screech of metal, they were torn from their moorings as if they were made from cereal boxes. They went airborne and were flung away far over the crest of the hill. Annabeth ducked, automatically placing her hands over her head, but neither Nico nor Percy moved, continuing the faceoff.

"You're telling me that I'm melodramatic? Didn't you notice the fact that my mom is dead?" Percy continued, getting down from his perch and walking towards Nico.

"Yeah, I did notice," Nico said, punctuating his words with an eye roll. "But are you _really_ going to pull the dead mommy card on me?" He laughed. "Hi. Remember me? I'm a longstanding member of the Dead Mothers Club. You should swing by. We have badges and a secret handshake and everything. So boo hoo, Percy, your mom is dead. Newsflash: you're not the only one that's suffering. Do you see me going nuclear? Am I —"

Nico never got to finish his sentence. A bolt of lightning shot down from the sky and blasted the hillside right at Nico's feet. Nico went cartwheeling away through the air, one dark patch in a massive blinding explosion of light. Annabeth screamed and started up the slope immediately towards Nico; when the light had faded all she could see was his crumpled form. Percy was just standing there with his fists clenched, breathing heavily and staring at the smoking crater where his cousin had been.

"Nico!" Annabeth shouted, her thighs burning as they tackled the incline. "Nico, are you okay?" Nico moaned slightly and Annabeth felt like she could breathe again. "You could have killed him!" Annabeth said sharply to Percy, her face rigid with shock. Nico was being dumb, rude and insensitive (granted, not entirely that different from Nico just being Nico) but for Percy to react that way…

"He had it coming," Percy said darkly.

Nico began to laugh, and Annabeth turned to him again with an incredulous frown on her face. Had his brain been crispy fried?

"That felt a whole lot like control to me, Perce!" he said, sitting up and grinning, which revealed teeth stained with blood. His nose was also bleeding and his hair was standing on end. Like the rock where he had been standing he was also smoking; patches of his clothes were missing, showing bare skin, and the thick soles of his boots had been totally melted. He sniffed up a trickle of blood, then cuffed it on his sleeve. "Wow, yeah. That seemed like some of that control you said that you didn't have. Also, about not being tied to this planet? Your mom's memory seems to be doing it pretty well and it's not the only thing you've got going for you down here." His voice softened. "Gods, Percy, I miss her too. You're not the only one. She was like this massive light in the world and if I can't imagine the darkness that's going to be left without her then I have no idea what you're feeling. But seriously, Percy, my point still stands. That lightning? Control. Those feelings? Real. For Zeus's sake, please just accept them. It's shunning them that's turning you into a god. Turning your back on them is _not the way to go_."

"Did you just provoke him into attempted murder?" Annabeth asked, not sure whether to laugh or slap him.

"You always said that that's what I do best," Nico said, fairly chirpily for someone that had nearly been electrocuted. "Sometimes it's the only way. I hoped he'd choose lightning. I mean, I figured, hey, if I can take control of the earth I then maybe I'm a little bit resistant to being electrocuted."

"What if it _hadn't _been lightning?" Annabeth chided. "What if he'd blown you over the hill?"

Nico chose to ignore the _what ifs _and groaned, looking down at his feet. "And crap. These were my favourite boots."

"Rubber soles," Annabeth commented. "Just because you're a fashion victim doesn't mean that you have to be an electrocution victim."

"I'm aware of the physics behind it, thanks," Nico said, wincing as he tried to sit up all of the way.

"Physics?" Annabeth echoed, arching an eyebrow. "Seriously, who are you again?"

"Not important," Nico said quietly, nodding behind her to Percy. "I think it's time to tell him."

Sometimes, the only way to get through to someone was to be a total dick to them. He'd learned that over the years. If all else failed, goading someone into anger was a pretty good way to snap someone out of anything, and for the first time since he'd began to enter godhood Percy looked like he had a chink in his armour. He'd stopped glowing as much now and the night and the darkness brought on by the storm (which suddenly seemed quieter and less violent) was beginning to choke him like it was both Nico and Annabeth.

Annabeth's hand went to her stomach automatically at Nico's words and she licked her lips before half-turning away from him towards Percy. Her mouth opened and closed; despite the pouring rain her tongue felt like she was just done licking up the Sahara.

Nico's eyes flicked between both of them, waiting for Annabeth to say what she had to say. Annabeth had to wake up and be the two to his one in this one-two punch he was trying on Percy. The guy in question was already starting to look a little less intense, considering the possibility that the bolt of lightning had been the control Nico had said it had been. Unbeknownst to Percy although incredibly apparent to Annabeth and Nico, the rain began to fall less heavily as Percy took a step closer to them.

"What does Nico want you to tell me?" Percy eventually prodded. "What's going on Annabeth?"

All Annabeth could do was open and close her mouth, trying to force the words out. The hand that was on her stomach tightened into a fist.

"Are you really telling me that I got electrocuted for nothing?" Nico asked, a little harshly, Annabeth thought. "_Tell him_. Or do you want me to do it?"

Annabeth closed her eyes and decided to throw caution to the winds. Despite her earlier uncertainties about dropping this on him she just resolved to do it fast like ripping off a band aid. "I'm pregnant," she blurted, opening her eyes just as she finished the sentence in order to catch his reaction.

At first there wasn't much of a reaction, it had to be said. Once again she found herself holding her breath, on tenterhooks as she waited for him to say something.

"Oh," Percy said eventually, not looking at her. "Okay."

"_Okay?" _Annabeth bit out, her voice rising in pitch at the second syllable. "All I get is _okay_?"

As she was seeing red at Percy's less-than-stellar reaction to the news, Nico had somehow found his way over to her and was standing behind her, a hand on her shoulder.

"Shut up and look," he said, flicking his eyes upward.

Her eyes followed his and were nearly blinded by the pearliness of the bright blue ring in the clouds that was letting sunlight stream out. She felt something bubble up inside her as she looked back down at Percy, who looked like the remainder of the rain was washing the golden glow from his body as if it had been nothing but dye. She burst out laughing suddenly; she couldn't help it and before she knew it hysteria had taken over. This is what she had been waiting for since Poseidon had revealed to them what was going on; getting here had been insanely difficult and more than once she had allowed herself to lapse into what turned out to be unnecessary despair but they were here now, and what else could a demigod do now except for laugh with relief?

"You're pregnant?" Percy asked, shoving wet hair off his forehead.

"Have you not been following?" Annabeth demanded, although the effect was lost by her gulping in air between peals of laughter and gasping over the pain in her spasming diaphragm. "Yes, you seaweed-brained idiot. I am."

The rain slowed to a fine drizzle as a grin, one that Annabeth had thought that she would never see again, split Percy's face in two. He watched her laughing, his eyes dancing. His forehead crinkled uncertainly at her uncharacteristic behaviour before he started laughing too. By now, tears were half-blinding Annabeth as she ran towards Percy, throwing her arms around his neck and burying her cheek in the hollow between his collarbone and shoulder. Percy closed his eyes, kissing her on the top of her bedraggled head.

Annabeth's legs finally decided that they were done holding her up but, as her knees buckled, Percy made no move to catch her and instead sank to the ground with her, holding her as tightly as he could. Tears were squeezing their way out from his closed eyelids. He peeled himself from Annabeth and held her by her shoulders at arm's length.

"Really?" he asked again, searching her face.

Annabeth smacked him on the shoulder with her fist indignantly, which was all of the answer that he needed but she followed up with an emphatic, "YES!" anyway, just to make things extra clear before they returned to the embrace.

"I thought I'd lost you," Annabeth mumbled into his chest as the laughter evaporated and left them to silence. "Oh, gods, Percy, I'm so, so sorry about your mom but I just… losing you…"

Percy shushed her; she felt him shake his head thanks to his chin on the top of his head.

"It's okay," he soothed. "I'm not going anywhere."

That was enough to elicit fresh tears of happiness and relief from Annabeth and she didn't say anything for a long while, just let the tears fall quietly down her cheeks as the air around them brightened by the minute. It took her a while to realise that they had entered into some symbiotic rocking momentum, although she couldn't be sure who had actually initiated it.

"Are you going to be okay?" Annabeth asked, not looking up at his face or moving from his chest.

"No," Percy said quietly; she could tell there was a tremor to his voice even from the single syllable. "No," he said again, and once more she felt him shake his head rather than saw it. "I don't think I'll ever be okay."

Annabeth's heart broke to hear him say it and she squeezed him tighter, trying to convey her support in one of the only ways her brain would allow her to at the moment, wrung out as it was.

"I'm never going to be okay that she's gone or that our kid has to grow up without their grams," he said regretfully. "But I guess I just have to get used to the fact that she's not coming back."

"She would have been awesome at it," Annabeth murmured quietly.

"I know," Percy agreed, struggling to keep his voice under control as his throat bobbed and threatened fresh tears. "But, hey, that doesn't mean that I'm going to love you or this kid any less just because I miss her, okay?" He gently tilted her face upwards and kissed her gently on the forehead. "Got it?"

By now, the soupy cloud cover had more holes in it than an old colander; the early evening Californian sunshine was beginning to unfurl itself from above and highlight various aspects of the landscape around them.

"I'm sorry," Percy said quietly in her ear. "I'm so sorry for putting you through that. I thought that that was it for me. I didn't think I'd ever be able to stop."

"Don't apologise," Annabeth said soothingly, gently shifting away a sodden lock of hair from his forehead. "No need. Your mom…"

Percy nodded. "Yeah."

"I meant what I said though," Annabeth told him. "About me not knowing what I'd do without you."

"You'll never need to find out," Percy promised. He released the hug to spread his arms wide, gesturing at both himself and all around him. "You see this?" he said, smiling at her. "All of this? You did this."

"_We_ did it," Annabeth corrected, putting one hand on her stomach and another on his knee. "The three of us." She paused, crinkling her nose. "Wow that sounds weird."

"Kind of does," Percy said, after considering. "The Jackson Three."

Annabeth snorted and dug him in the ribs. "Yeah, no. We'll talk later about possible last names. I _might _accept something double-barrelled."

Percy laughed and hugged her again and for a couple of minutes he felt like there was truly, absolutely, nothing else that mattered in the world.


	11. Epilogue

**So, this is it. We're done with this now. It's finally over. I can't believe that the behemoth that is this fic came to me from a song while rinsing out conditioner. Crazy.**

**I want to thank everyone that has reviewed this. Seriously, guys, those little alerts in my inbox just make my day, more than you can imagine. I also need to thank everyone that has added me to their favourites and alerts, even if you've been too shy to review (I am guilty of the same thing), because alerts about you guys favouriting me also make my day. It's just nice to know it and means the freaking world to me.**

**Thank you, once again, to everyone that has stuck by me along what has been a very bumpy road for this fic, even though it started out on a relatively smooth one — I tortured you all with a ridiculous gap between updates and for that I'm sorry. I had so much stuff to sort out while I was writing this. You wouldn't believe.**

**This is the epilogue. The last chapter. I sincerely hope that I've tied everything up. I've tried to but by the gods it's been so long since I started writing this that I've forgotten half of the things that I wanted to add into this story for the ending.**

**I sincerely hope that you enjoy what I've written below, and have enjoyed what I've written in the past.**

**I am taking a break from PJO now because I don't think it should be this hard to get it done. I might come back with small, fun things at a later date but for now, th-th-th-that's all, folks! /Porky Pig. I'm going to read The Lost Hero again as well.**

**If you have any questions/comments/hate mail/flames etc. that you don't want to leave as a review then you can always PM me. I honestly don't bite, unless you've caught me in that dangerous thirty minutes or so when I've got out of bed, before I've had my coffee and then before the coffee really kicks in. Then I'm mean and vicious, but also not in a fit state to be replying or even reading PMs, so you'll be spared.**

**Once again, I love you guys. One and all. Thank you for reading.**

**Mission to Marzipan, over and out.**

* * *

People had been bringing food for what felt like days.

Sally had been very well-liked amongst the neighbours and had had a wide circle of friends, which had been founded as soon as she'd managed to get out of Gabe's grasp and found herself _able_ to have friends. She had also helped at various charities, including ones for battered women and homeless children, and had headed up a bridge club, a book club and a sewing circle, all of which met weekly on various days in her apartment. She had been liked and loved by many, many people and all of them appeared to have been at her funeral —the last guests to turn up had had to put up with standing room only. A lot of these people had brought food in the days following the announcement of her death; the fridge was overflowing with casseroles and lasagnes and pies and soups, and that was after the freezer had been crammed to bursting.

People had showed further generosity when they heard of the gathering that was being held in Sally and Paul's apartment following the funeral. Platters upon platters of sandwiches had turned up, as had two baked hams; a large plate of sliced, roasted chicken; gallons of soups in loaned crockpots; a million tiny canapés and hors d'oeuvres; four three-tiered cakes stands loaded with cupcakes and muffins; cakes and pastries of all kinds; pies savoury and sweet…

Percy, Paul and Annabeth had been totally overwhelmed by the onslaught of food and the notion of somehow putting together an event following the funeral based on it all. Between the three of them, none of them knew where to start, which just brought fresh pain because they all knew that Sally, in whose memory they were holding the whole thing in, would have known exactly what to do and how to organise it.

But Sally, of course, wasn't there and never would be again.

Annabeth and Paul nearly cried with relief when Rachel turned up the morning of the funeral with four sombrely-dressed waiting staff and two crates of Sally's favourite wine. The staff put the buffet together and circled the apartment continuously, keeping plates, cups and glasses topped up, doling out the soup and discretely offering napkins on which to balance glasses that had come into contact with the bare wood surfaces belonging to furniture. It had given Paul and Annabeth the time to mingle and accept from well-wishers what felt like ridiculously hollow sentiments and condolences given how they felt, as well as allowing them to totally forget about the logistics of the day itself and focus on just getting to the end of it.

Though Percy had stood at the door with Annabeth at first, gripping her hand tightly and nodding at entering guests, his eyes red, he had quickly slipped away from the entire thing, knowing that he couldn't just stand there accepting pleasantries and making small talk without getting very angry or very sad or both. He was sitting on the fire escape outside Sally and Paul's bedroom, his legs dangling off the edge and silently watching the city go about its business in a way that seemed to be mocking him. New York City was as bustling and as busy as ever, yet he felt like he'd hit a brick wall and shattered into a million tiny shards; he felt like his life had come to a painful, screeching halt on the death of his mother and yet the city kept on churning away, mindlessly oblivious to what he was feeling.

The door clicked shut behind Annabeth and she leaned against it, her eyes downcast to the floor. With the last of the people gone, it was almost as if the apartment had let out a breath it had been holding and so she too finally let out the breath it felt like s_he'd_ been holding all day and slid down the door. She drew her knees up to her chest (awkwardly because of the length of the stupid black skirt she was wearing) and then rested her forehead on them, wrapping her arms around her legs.

"What a day, huh?" Nico commented idly, standing in front of her with his hands shoved in the pockets of the suit jacket he was wearing.

Annabeth didn't answer; instead, she reached up for her hair, which had been tamed into a chignon that could have passed as elegant for the day, and began plucking out bobby pins and other hair paraphernalia, gradually letting the blonde locks fall from their confines layer by layer until they were totally free. Her scalp practically sang its thanks. She was glad that the people had gone, glad that they'd all stopped trying to help and offer comfort. It had got to the point where it had been irking her.

Paul had apparently felt the same way; he had announced that he was going to take a walk as soon as he'd accepted one last expression of sympathy and, despite his intentions to the contrary, promised, once again, to call if he ever needed anything. It was Paul that Annabeth had shut the door after; if she hadn't opened it for him, she felt like there would have been a Paul-shaped hole in it, à la Wile E. Coyote, such was the speed he had used to rush from the place with. His silk tie was abandoned in a crumpled heap next to her; he had wrenched it from his neck as he had walked out the door.

"Please tell me that it's over?" Annabeth asked weakly, raking the last of the hairspray out with her fingers and looking up at Nico tiredly, the shadows under her eyes seeming more prominent than they had ever been before.

"It's over," Nico confirmed. "We got rid of them. Even the blue rinse brigade from the bridge club that kept trying to feed me."

Annabeth's eyes scanned Nico, taking him in for the first time that day. "It's the suit," she said at last. "It makes you look even scrawnier than usual."

"Great," Nico grunted. "Thanks."

Annabeth snorted and forced herself to her feet. The new vantage point gave her a good view of the carnage that was the apartment and she immediately wished that she hadn't got up. "This place looks like a warzone," she said, mostly to herself.

"I've seen tidier warzones," Nico replied dryly, his lip curling slightly in distaste.

Annabeth sighed as she surveyed the scene. All around the living area of the apartment crockery lay abandoned. Plates covered in crumbs and half-finished food littered nearly all the surfaces, as did cups with the dregs of coffee and tea in them, many with lipstick-prints on the rims. The glasses had also suffered a similar fate. Dimly, Annabeth remembered Rachel (who was currently liaising with the staff regarding payment or whatever it was she had said she was doing) saying something about how the wine glasses were loaned by the catering company, but Annabeth couldn't remember what that meant that she had to do with them. Did she just give them back dirty? Her forehead creased into a frown as she almost dazedly walked through into the kitchen, letting her fingers brush over half-eaten, half-covered dishes that littered the countertops. More food that would probably just go bad waiting for them to eat it. Brilliant.

Nico trailed after her into the kitchen as she looked helplessly at the semi-demolished food. She blew out a loud sigh through her lips, which ruffled her newly-released hair, and got a trash bag from under the sink. Slowly, she began emptying the contents of dishes and plates and bowls and platters into it uncaringly. There had been more than enough for everyone and the fridge and freezer were already full. She hadn't even touched food all day; she had felt too sick to even think about eating, so had no qualms about emptying everything into the trash. It made her feel a little better so be able to see a pile of crockery on the island instead of the part-decimated buffet that had been there moments before.

"There's enough her to feed half of New York," Nico commented quietly, looking just as helpless as Annabeth in the wake of the food and mess in front of him.

"I think half of New York was just in the apartment," Annabeth returned evenly, dropping the trash bag and tucking her hands into her hips.

"How do you think Percy's holding up?" Nico asked her, shoving half a cake that had escaped Phase One of Annabeth's purge aside and hopping up onto the counter in the space left by it. As an afterthought, he grabbed a slice of the cake and started eating it, dropping crumbs down his suit.

"I don't know, why don't you ask him?" Annabeth said snappishly.

Nico didn't answer; instead, he began peeling the icing (which was the only part of the cake he had decided that he actually liked) from the slice and eventually abandoned the rest of it on the plate with its other companions, a warning of what was to come.

Annabeth sighed, closing her eyes. "Sorry, Nico," she said. "I just… it's been a stupidly long day, you know? And I'm freaking out about Percy as well. I don't even know what to say to him today, or at all really, not since… yeah. He's not been himself, which is totally understandable, but…"

Nico shoved the last of the frosting in his mouth. "Has he not been talking?" he asked, licking his fingers. Percy had been talking fine with him, in the few moments he'd had with him since what had happened at the Hollywood sign, so Annabeth telling him that Percy wasn't himself made him frown.

"He's been talking too much," Annabeth said. "He talks about the baby, about the future for us, the classes coming up in the fall, how he thinks he might go back to Camp for a few training sessions… Okay so yeah, it's constant, which I guess is normal for him, and everything is just full of that typical Percy optimism but he just won't talk about his mom or the whole god _mess_. He won't even let me bring it up; he starts talking baby names or announces that he's going to the ocean or just anything not to talk about it." She looked up at Nico and bit her lip. "Should… _should _he be talking about it?" she asked him, leaning back against the kitchen island and folding her arms.

"I deal with the dead, not the bereaved," Nico said bluntly, setting to work peeling the second piece of frosting from a second slice of cake. "The dead all behave pretty much the same. The bereaved do all kinds of crazy shit."

Annabeth bent to pick up the garbage bag and took a step forward but stopped. "These fucking _shoes_," she cursed, toeing off the low-heeled pumps and kicking them halfway across the kitchen. "It's like holding the sky up all over again just with my feet."

Nico watched one of the shoes skitter to a halt impassively, but took his cue from Annabeth and began loosening his tie and undoing shirt buttons. He wadded the tie up and tossed it on top of Annabeth's shoes. "I'm sure he'll talk to you about it eventually," he said. "He probably just needs time. I mean, at least he's talking, right?"

"He's acting like the same old Percy," Annabeth agreed. "But I'm just wondering if he _is_. I mean, how can he be after everything that happened? Percy is just… _Percy_, you know? Happy, goofy, optimistic, never backing down and never defeatist… We both saw a totally different side of him at that sign. It scared me how he just seemed to be willing to throw everything away."

"If you remember correctly," Nico said, "the whole Minos incident wasn't really me being me either. When I lost Bianca I put my faith in an evil Hades ghost judge because it just seemed like the right thing to do. Like I said: people are all nuts and unpredictable when they're grieving. Anyway, he decided not to throw it all away in the end. Isn't that what's the most important thing?"

Annabeth shrugged slowly; even the hunching and releasing of her shoulders seemed to require an intense amount of energy. She turned away from Nico and ran a hand over her eyes before bending to open the dishwasher; the empty bottom rack rattled as she did so, seeming obscenely loud in the silence that had settled over the apartment since everyone had left. She began jamming crockery in haphazardly.

"That won't wash if you don't load it right," Nico said, picking raisins out of a third slice of cake to see if it would make it any more palatable.

"Screw it. Honestly? I can't care right now. I don't have it in me. Now are you going to help or not?"

"Not," Nico said decisively, seemingly impassive to her change in mood flicking a raisin across the kitchen.

Annabeth glowered at him but he pretended not to notice, so instead she just resumed her busywork with the dishwasher. As she finished ramming a particularly large platter into the machine with great difficulty, she heard the screech and pop of a cork being pulled from a bottle. She looked up, brushing away the hair that had fallen in her face, so see Nico pouring a glass of wine.

"You're underage," Annabeth told him as the wine glugged and the glass filled.

"So? I think you just mistook me for someone that actually gave a shit about that. Are you going to arrest me or not?" he asked, finishing pouring.

"Not," Annabeth said.

Nico snorted and flashed a small smile. "Good," he said, shoving the glass in her direction and starting to pour another. "Then this is for you."

Annabeth tried to look disapproving but caved quickly. Stepping over the open dishwasher she took the glass gratefully. "Sally," she said, both heavily and quietly.

Nico nodded and they both clinked glasses before taking long drinks.

"Today _sucks_," Nico said eventually, putting his glass down.

"Yeah," Annabeth agreed, glancing at her glass and then shooting what was left back. She gave a low moan as the alcohol bit. "Oh sweet Zeus that tastes good. Keep is coming, barkeep." She held her glass out to Nico, who drained his own before filling them both back up again using the dregs of the bottle.

Annabeth sipped more slowly this time; the lack of food in her stomach had sent the wine rushing straight to her head and she was already feeling a little spacey. The silence gaped in the kitchen and they both remained silent, avoiding eye contact and lost in their own thoughts. Finally, Nico dipped his finger in the wine and began running it around the rim of the glass, making the crystal sing a single, haunting note, just to fill the kitchen with some kind of noise. It was testament to how low Annabeth was feeling that she barely felt the sound cutting through her and made no effort to stop him.

She took another sip, but Nico suddenly saw something leap behind her eyes and they blew wide with panic; she nearly choked on the mouthful as she spat it back into her glass and put it down on the counter, shoving it away from her.

"Wine!" she choked out, having half-drowned on it. "I can't be drinking _wine_!"

"Oh crap," Nico said, wincing. "Right, sorry. I forgot you have to deny yourself all of the fun things in life for the next nine months while that thing percolates." He paused. "Did you _have _to spit half of it all over the place though? I could have had that glass. Waste not want not or whatever."

Annabeth grabbed a crumpled paper napkin and began mopping around her mouth with it. "What's with you calling the baby a _thing_?" she demanded.

"It. That. The baby. Whatever," Nico said, shaking its head. "What am I supposed to call it while it's just kind of bobbing around in there waiting to be born? You don't even know if it's a he or a she yet."

"It doesn't _bob around_," Annabeth began. "It just…" She frowned deeply, desperately trying to remember the human reproductive biology stuff that she hadn't paid much attention to because she was drawing frontal elevation plans in the back cover of the textbook. "Well, you know, I think it _is_ actually surrounded by amniotic fluid because that's what comes out when your water breaks…"

"Fine, so _the baby _is doing the backstroke or whatever in there right now. Interesting." Nico paused and wrinkled his nose. "Actually, not so much interesting as gross. Really gross."

Annabeth put a hand to her stomach uneasily, making a mental note to add some baby books to the bottom of her reading list for the fall. It felt weird not knowing what was happening inside her right now. "Can we just change the subject? I don't think I want to discuss the inner workings of my uterus with you anymore," she said.

"_Good_," Nico said emphatically, "because I don't want to hear about it."

Annabeth was feeling guilty about how good that first glass of wine had tasted. She reasoned that some women drank and even smoked for the first part of a pregnancy before they even realised that they were pregnant, so hopefully one glass of wine wasn't going to do any harm.

"Whoever brought this cake clearly wasn't very sympathetic," Nico commented, abruptly changing the subject and filling Annabeth with gratitude. He had dissected a slice of cake with a fork and had discovered all kinds of peel and nuts in the cake as well as raisins. "In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they didn't like Sally _at all._"

"Old people like fruit cake," Annabeth murmured, her hands back on her hips as she wondered anew where to start. "I'm sure they thought it was a lovely gesture."

"Pfft. A lovely gesture is Mississippi mud pie," Nico said. "Or red velvet cake. This is just tragic. I bet they were disappointed when they turned up and found that she was being cremated and so they couldn't do a little jig on her grave."

"Nico!" Annabeth scolded, sounding genuinely shocked.

"Don't care," Nico said shortly, feeling his temper rising for no real discernable reason other than the fact that he was pissed at the entire fucking day and, while he was at it, the universe and the Fates and whatever else had had a hand in bringing everything that had happened down upon them. "Sally was this amazing person and all these people could bring is…" He broke off and looked around himself for an example, latching onto a large oval baking dish and yanking back its foil covering. "_This_," he said in disgust, jabbing at it with the fork that had eviscerated the cake. "It looks like tuna and sewage. Oh, so sorry for your loss, here's a casserole I made with all of the crap I've had hanging around in my cupboards since the times we hoarded canned food because we thought the Russians were going to nuke the shit out of us."

His voice was rising and he couldn't stop himself; he just felt so _mad_, first at Sally's death and then at himself for not being able to stop it, and _someone_ had to be on the receiving end of it, and who better than the parade of black-clad mourners, half of whom he was convinced had come because they heard there'd be tea and cookies?

"Nico—" Annabeth started, but the son of Hades wasn't finished.

"And look!" he crowed, lifting the dish up to look underneath it. "Look! Someone actually wrote their name on the bottom of this. I bet they're expecting a fucking handwritten thank you letter."

"Nico!" Annabeth at last managed to break in with. "_Chill_. Seriously. These people were just doing what they thought was best. It was a nice gesture and it's the thought that counts, _remember_?"

Nico slammed the dish back down onto the counter and glared at it sullenly. The loud buzz of silence threatened to engulf them again, but Nico broke it by huffing an irritated sigh.

"Whatever," he said. "I just think she deserved more than canned leftovers and fricking _fruit cake_, you know?"

A ghost of a smile flitted across Annabeth's lips, which was lost almost immediately as her face crumpled. "She did," she said in a small voice. "But I think everyone did the best they could." She quickly swiped at her eyes with her forearm under the pretence of shoving hair off her forehead to stave off some more tears and turned her back on Nico, reaching for a pile of cutlery and just pouring it from her hand into the dishwasher's basket in a deafening barrage of clanging metal.

Nico watched her work for a little while, then hopped off the counter and crossed the kitchen. "You know what? Hand me that tray," he said quietly, pointing at one of the silver platters the waiting staff had left behind.

Annabeth cocked an eyebrow at him when she handed him the tray but neither of them said anything as Nico left the kitchen for the living room, momentarily needing as much space as Annabeth did. Neither of them wanted to watch the other try to stave off more tears because that's the kind of people they were, so instead he used the time to reprimand himself for letting angry tears threaten to fall in the first place. He still didn't get why did it had to be Sally. Why couldn't there have been something that they could have done to fix it? She had been one of the best and brightest women that Nico had ever met and had acted practically as a surrogate mother to him on occasion when he had needed it, and now she was gone and she wasn't coming back.

He hated that so hard and, despite his clenched jaw, the cups and saucers that he was stacking onto the tray blurred and shimmered in front of him behind a film of tears. He bit his tongue, hard, to put them off and finished filling the tray with just some of the flotsam and jetsam of crockery, cutlery and glassware that the wake had left behind.

When he returned to the kitchen a whole lot more composed and slid the tray onto the counter, Annabeth cleared her throat loudly and tossed down the napkin that had been suspiciously close to her eyes when Nico had walked in.

Annabeth poured detergent into the machine (having overfilled it, she was forced to jam the door closed with her heel) before closing the appliance and flicking it on. It hummed and hissed a little, hesitating as it gathered its thoughts, before beginning the steady rush of filling up before the start of the cycle. They both stood staring at the dull sheen of the chrome door of the appliance for a while, leaning against the kitchen island behind them as it finished filling and began the wash proper.

"Do you promise not to tell anyone if I hug you?" Nico asked suddenly, feeling a totally uncharacteristic need for human contact.

Annabeth was already turning to him and pressed her cheek into his shirt. "Deal," she said. "Only if you promise to do the same for me." She settled into the hug and then groaned, "Why can't today just be over?"

All Nico could so was shrug and sigh. "Soon," he said. "But you get that that doesn't stop tomorrow coming, or the day after, and the day after…"

"Nope," Annabeth said firmly. "Not now." She didn't need to think about the days that were stretching ahead of her where she'd have to deal with feeling like this, deal with _Percy _when he was feeling like this.

"Thanks," Nico eventually said gruffly.

"What for?" Annabeth asked, breaking away from him and looking up at him.

Nico cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. "For, uh, not telling anyone that I hugged you."

This elicited a small laugh from Annabeth; she smiled and said, "Ditto."

* * *

If there was one thing that Sally had taught Percy, it was that life wasn't fair; it couldn't always go your way. Not that she's told him this directly of course, because she was not that kind of mother — who would tell their offspring that they were on a long and depressing road called life, that it sucked but that was it? It was indirectly that Sally had taught him that — between losing her parents young, falling in love with an unobtainable god, being forced to be a single mother, marrying a total pig and the gods only knew what other tragedies that she had had to endure over the years, Percy had quickly learned from her, as soon as he'd been able to grasp the concept, that life simply couldn't always go your way. She would never impose that directly on him, but he had learnt it from her anyway. Sometimes, all that you could do was just make do with what you had.

Through the fact that Sally had dealt with it all with unfailing tenacity, good will and strength, she had taught Percy a second lesson: that there nothing could be got from complaining about being ill-treated by life. Nothing. So instead you might as well not bother and accept everything that was thrown at you and allow it to make you a stronger person rather than something that you had to fight against constantly.

It sounded cold to put it that way but it wasn't, not really. Percy had inherited a lot of his traits from her: like Sally, he would never shy away from anything life threw at him, no matter what it was. Life and all of the events in it were what they were and that was that — if he had to fight to the death with a Titan Lord because a prophecy said that he was going to save the world, then so be it. What was the use of whining about it if that's what had to happen? Coming through bad situations, even when more and more bad news just kept coming, was another thing he had learned from Sally. Just have faith, grit your teeth, keep going and you would be fine. Be the Little Engine That Could in the face of adversity and you would go far.

With Sally, it wasn't just that old chestnut about how if life gave you lemons you should make lemonade. Lemonade was one by-product of lemons, sure, but what about lemon meringue pie or lemon cheesecake and, while you were at it, poking the peel down the garbage disposal to freshen the drains or using the juice for cleaning your brass ornaments or adding a little olive oil and using it to polish wooden furniture when your budget wouldn't stretch to Pledge because your wife-beating, douchebag of a husband wouldn't let you have the money but expected the place to be clean?

Anyway, life hadn't even given her lemons: it had given her a huge, steaming pile of horse shit and yet, somehow, she'd still managed to use it to grow prize roses, such was her sheer force of will. That's why Percy, and a whole bunch of other people, had loved her so much. Her ability to do that, her ability to bring light into a room, the fact that she had a smile that was contagious and never had a cross word to say about anyone just magnified this.

And now she was gone.

Percy's legs were dangling off the edge of the fire escape; he had slotted them through the metal bars, which he had also got his arms wrapped around. He was trying to let himself get lost in the hubbub of the city, but he couldn't quite manage it. It was like his mom's death was a kind of anchor, tethering him so that he couldn't get lost in the noisy bliss of other people just existing. Sometimes, it was good to just try and feel as little as possible, but he couldn't manage it, not this time.

There was a noise below him on the fire escape; he grabbed Riptide and uncapped it so quickly that his movements would barely have even registered for any mortal watching. Quietly, he withdrew his legs from between the bars and got to his feet, keeping low and swinging Riptide idly with his right hand.

His demigod senses kicked in and, despite the noise of the city in the background, he was acutely aware of the puffing and wheezing coming from the landing beneath his. He frowned, not able to think of any monster that had sounded like that, except maybe a smaller version of the Minotaur, which he was pretty sure didn't exist anyway and, even if it did, probably couldn't climb fire escapes.

Paul suddenly appeared, out of breath, hauling himself up the final ladder. He bent at the waist and leant on his knees, out of breath.

Percy turned Riptide back into a pen and shoved it in his pocket. "Paul?" he asked incredulously.

Paul shook his head, indicating that he still needed a minute to catch his breath. When he finally straightened up, he was red in the face. "Wow," he said. "It's a good job you don't need to get _up _these things if there's a fire…"

"You climbed the fire escape," Percy said, a small smile catching at the corners of his mouth.

Paul mopped at his forehead with his sleeve. "Yeah, well. I've done a few balcony scenes in my time acting Shakespeare in college and I thought, you know, how hard could it be?" He paused. "Of course, that was about more than thirty years and about thirty thousand pastries ago…"

"There's an elevator," Percy pointed out. "It's this new invention they created so you don't _have _to climb the fire escape."

"Hey, I'm not _that _old," Paul said. "I saw you were still on the fire escape from the street. I thought I'd come and join you."

Percy smiled again, this time a little wider. Despite coming to sit out on the fire escape, he was starting to realise that he didn't actually want to be totally alone. "You're not missing much," he said, spreading his arms wide. "Not a lot going on up here."

"You're up here," Paul said. "That's enough for me."

Paul had spent the first few years of his marriage floundering when it came to Percy. He had hovered around the kid, not entirely sure what was expected of him. Paul had no kids of his own and he didn't really have any idea how to deal with a fully-grown one that had been thrown in his lap. Not that he resented it at all — if anything, he loved it.

Not that it wasn't an adjustment, because it was: being a father was totally new to him but it wasn't even as if he'd been given a normal stepson to contend with. Again, there was no bitterness about that: Percy was who he was and he had no problems with that but he would probably never meet a kid (except maybe Nico, but even Nico still wanted a little bit of parenting every once in a while, whether he admitted that or not) that needed him less. Percy had saved the world. What kind of paternal guidance could he give someone that had already managed that?

It gradually became clear to him that Percy had had both a mother _and _a father in Sally (because she had had to be both because, hey, it's not like Gabe was ever going to step up to the plate, the slime ball) and then had another father figure in his actual dad, albeit a distant one. Yes, he could take Percy fishing and help him with his homework, take him to baseball and hockey games, even shoot a few hoops (_wow_ he was old — did the kids even call it hoops anymore?) with him before the aforementioned thirty thousand pastries had expanded his waistline, but he did those things more as a friend or a big brother than a father.

Not that he didn't put on his paternal cap every now and then of course, and he _did _keep his pens in a World's Best Dad mug Percy had got him for Father's Day, a gift which had choked him up ridiculously, but really Percy was like a cake: he had already been baked (_not _like that) when Paul came along and didn't need much else from him in the way of parenting.

It wasn't until Paul had figured that out that he'd entered into the great relationship he shared with Percy right now, and so when he said that Percy was worth climbing twelve floors he meant it.

Percy half-smiled. "Thanks. I thought I wanted to be alone," he said, leaning on the railings with his forearms and staring blankly down at the street. "It just made stuff worse."

"Sorry, Percy. I don't think there's going to be a lot to make this better. Not for a while." Paul moved to stand next to him and leant on the railings also. He wanted so badly to tell Percy that everything would be just _peachy _tomorrow morning when he woke up but patronising him would be ridiculous and neither of them would fall for it.

"Yeah," Percy said hollowly. "I know."

There was a silence, albeit a comfortable one, for a long while between them.

"I've got something for you," Paul said eventually, reaching into his pocket. He extracted a small black, square box. "I was supposed to get this for you on your birthday. Your mom sent me out to get the hamper and for this, but when I went by the shop they weren't finished resizing it so we had to wait and then… yeah. I've only just remembered that I was supposed to pick it up, sorry. That's where I went."

"What is it?" Percy asked, but given the size and shape of the box, he already had some idea.

"It's your grandmother's," Paul said, popping it open and revealing a ring. It was silver and had one large diamond in the middle with two smaller sapphires on either side.

Percy frowned. "Your mom's?"

Paul smiled at the idea of Percy considering his mother to be his own grandmother, even though she'd died before Percy had a chance to know her, but that wasn't the case. "No. Your mom's mom."

Percy took the box from Paul, the frown still in place as he stared at the ring. "I don't get it. Wasn't she wearing this when—"

"Her plane crashed?" Paul finished. "Yes. Your mom said that. But Percy, the plane crashed at sea…"

"Dad?" Percy asked quietly.

"Your mom said that she ran a bath and when she got out, the ring was sitting there at the bottom of the tub. She knew what it was straight away. She was so excited. I guess your dad knew as well as we did that you and Annabeth were getting close. She wanted to give it to you on your birthday."

"It's awesome," Percy said, almost mesmerised by the stones. "I can't believe it."

"Sally guessed Annabeth's ring size. I'm pretty sure she got it right," Paul said. "Your mom wanted you to have this Percy, to give to Annabeth. She wanted you to be happy and Annabeth, well, she makes you happy. Anyone can see that. And you know, it doesn't have to be today, or tomorrow but whenever you feel the time is right, it's for you to give to her."

Percy didn't know what to say for a long time. In the end, his throat bobbing with emotion, he snapped the box closed and shoved it in his pocket, then dragged his stepfather into a hug. Paul smiled and patted Percy on the back.

"I miss her so much," Percy confessed as they broke apart.

"I know," Paul said heavily. "She was one hell of a woman, Percy. I miss her too. We're going to make it through this though. Not just you and me but you've got your friends and Annabeth and a baby on the way. We've all got to keep going no matter how hard it is because your mom would want nothing else."

Percy sighed loudly and turned away from Paul to lean back on the railings again. The box was poking him in the thigh now, especially the corners, but the pressure felt good because he knew what was inside. The ring and what it represented was amazing. The future for him and Annabeth, as his _wife, _and their baby was all caught up inside that box, winking out of him from the stones and metal. Even though looking into the future right now tugged at his heart because it reminded him of his mother, which he was having to leave behind in the past, he couldn't help but think that it represented this whole new dawning, a bright light to lead him out of this darkness that he was mired in now.

Paul had said that he didn't have to propose to Annabeth right away and he was right — a similar thing applied to his grief. It wouldn't go away now, or tomorrow, but eventually it might get so that it didn't hurt so much anymore. Right now he was thinking about his mom constantly, but one day maybe it would get so that wasn't the case. Not that he wanted to forget her, because he didn't, but there was a special process involved in grieving that shifted your passed loved one slowly from the front of your mind to the back and then down into your heart. You never forgot them, but eventually the wound that was left by their departure began to heal and you didn't think about them every minute, and when you did you could do it without it feeling like you were being stabbed in the chest.

Even though he told Paul that being alone had made things worse, suddenly he wanted to be by himself again. The bereaved mind was constantly changing. Anything that it thought could help insulate it against the pain it decided to do, no matter what it had chosen to do previously, even if that had been moments ago.

But Percy also wanted to think about the ring and Annabeth and the future and how he was going to make that happen, how he was going to pick himself up and begin to piece together the shattered remains of what had been his life before his birthday.

"I might be out here for a while," he said quietly to Paul, his eyes fixed unseeingly on what would be called the horizon if this weren't New York and the view were not blocked by buildings.

"Okay," Paul said, hunkering down and also leaning back on the railings next to Percy. "Take your time. I've got nowhere else to be right now."

They stood side by side in silence as the city around them begin to incandescently flare with millions of light bulbs as the sun set. The day was ending and tomorrow would be another one and another step forwards in the process of learning to live their lives without Sally in them and eventually move on.


End file.
